Capacity Building with Southern Africa’s Women and Children in an Era of Globalization and the HIV/AIDS Pandemic: A Human Rights Challenge for Reclaiming Civil Society
The persistence of scarcity in health care resources compounded by crippling forces of economic globalization in southern Africa reflect the absence of global political and public will. Such neglect exacerbates the ravaging of the HIV/AIDS pandemic unabated, while eroding any prospects for capacity building to achieve sustainable development in the region's nations. Even, education, a tool essential for capacity building through human and social capital development is being compromised by a dwindling supply of both educators and students wiped out by AIDS. By relentlessly targeting the most productive age-cohort unchecked, HIV/AIDS is becoming genocidal to the region's Africans.
This paper will demonstrate how the scourge of HIV/AIDS undermines human capacity, social capital, economic productivity and sustainable development through economic stagnation due to a sharp decrease in the workforce and food insecurity. Ill-fated public policy-making processes as found in the adoption of ESAPs and inflated military budgets have led to devastating socioeconomic consequences further complicating the situation. Thus, the region has become a microcosm of the adverse effects of globalization at the local level-a situation in which households, carry the burden of safety-absorbing the income lost due to HIV/AIDS’ disability, unemployment or death of breadwinners in the absence of public social expenditure. Globalization through ESAPs has pushed to transform national health care systems into privately controlled commodities by shifting public responsibility and control over health care from governments to the drug and insurance industries while forcing poor families to safety-absorb the financial costs.
In proposing change, the paper appeals to the progressive international community’s collective conscience, particularly those of the wealthy ‘civilized’ nations, to rethink their role in allowing the threat of the scourge of HIV/AIDS to wipe out whole nations simply because these global citizens cannot afford to pay for treatments in a world of plenty. International social workers of the 21st century may not leave such a situation unchecked since it threatens the core of human rights and social justice.