WED-057 - HIV Stigma Beliefs, Condom Use, and women's Empowerment in Sub-saharan Africa

Brief Abstract Summary: 1) Advance understanding of health equity and social justice through increasing your understanding of the relationship between HIV stigma beliefs, condom use, and women’s empowerment in a global setting.
2) Gain new knowledge about the moderating role of women empowerment in the relationship between HIV stigma beliefs and condom use in Sub Saharan Africa.
3) Learn about interesting findings from a secondary analysis of a large scale global database - the demographic and health survey which is a global database on various health indexes such as nutrition, maternal mortality, gender, education.
4) Learn about applying a multinomial regression model to understand the relationships between various variables crucial to women’s health such as women’s employment, empowerment, and marital status.
5) Discover important implications of this research in creating a more fair and equitable world for women of the Global Majority.

Detailed abstract description: Despite significant advances in the fight against HIV in Sub-Saharan Africa, health experts remain concerned about reducing new infections and risky sexual behaviors, especially among young women. Previous studies on condom use and stigma in countries such as Kenya have shown that differential condom use has been associated with poor knowledge about AIDS and negative attitudes toward testing, but not with gender or tribal affiliation (Hamra & D’Agostino, 2008). Additionally, other studies have shown that more education and HIV/AIDS knowledge can lead to less stigmatizing beliefs about HIV (Volk & Koopman, 2001). Absent from this scholarship is a consistent focus on the association between HIV stigma beliefs and sexual behavior, and how empowering young women in their social contexts alters this association. We fill this gap by using Demographic and Health Survey data from Sub-Saharan Africa to examine how measures of women’s empowerment moderate the association between HIV stigma beliefs and sexual behavior.
This presentation uses data from the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) Sub-Saharan Africa. This database comprises surveys from over 90 countries, covering a wide range of topics such as gender, education, nutrition, maternal mortality, wealth index, and childhood mortality. The highest number of provinces are from Chad in Central Africa. The respondents' ages range from 15 to 24 years old in the survey with a total number of respondents being 161,883.
Findings first suggest that increases in conservative HIV attitudes are associated with declines in the probability of consistent condom use for young women. However, we also find that this relationship weakens as women’s regional employment increases or the level of regional gender stratification declines. This evidence suggests that making investments in factors that support women’s employment can weaken a potentially troubling epidemiological relationship in Sub-Saharan Africa.
These findings are relevant to public health researchers and practitioners, policymakers, sexual and mental health educators, universities, and research NGOs globally. These findings have implications for women’s reproductive health promotion by demonstrating the role of women’ s empowerment in increasing condom use in low-resource settings in Sub-Saharan Africa.