Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2004. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date. 
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Voice of America - July 15, 2004
Joe De Capua
Washington
The link between poverty and HIV/AIDS can be found in the Kiambiu slums in Nairobi. Many of Kenya's poor – who are infected with HIV – have migrated there. Amid the squalor, women are taking the lead to provide care and comfort.
The Kiambiu slums have been growing over the last few years. People from rural areas are migrating to Nairobi due to unemployment and HIV/AIDS claiming the lives of family breadwinners.
Recently, Nane Annan, wife of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, visited an outreach program in Kiambiu supported by the Kenya Network of Women Living with AIDS. Joining Mrs. Annan was Nyaradzai Gumbonzvanda, human rights lawyer and regional program director for UNIFEM, the UN Development Fund for Women.
"This is a recent settlement compared to the other slum areas in Kenya. And the situation is deplorable. There are no basic social services, no running water. You find water flowing in between the houses. People are overcrowded. They're living in these mud huts with literally no ventilation, no lighting," she says.
She says much more must be done to help those living in abject poverty due to HIV/AIDS. She describes one mother barely clinging to life.
"When we met with this woman, her husband had died a year before. And she had migrated from some community; we couldn't get much of the details. But probably with what we know she might have come from a rural area and might have been dispossessed of property or land and then find herself in the slum with five children and living positively with HIV. And now she's dying and has still the responsibility to care for the five children," she says.
Mrs. Gumbonzvanda says the woman's face clearly expressed the trauma of her life.
"It was painful; it was difficult to look this woman in her eyes as a widow, as a dying widow with children to care for. But with all the gender discrimination around her – and at the same time it was very powerful – to see how women living with HIV and AIDS are rising to the occasion to provide care not only to other women, but to men and also to the community at large," she says.
Caring for the dying mother is a young woman. Although in need of food and medicine herself, she does the best she can for her friend.
"Really when I looked at this young girl Esther, who was standing there in the dark taking care of this other woman, I could not even imagine her own life and how she would need to fulfill her own needs because she has given up totally to helping other people," she says.
She says people like Esther – who put others' needs before their own – could do even more for the community if they received a little help.
"We cannot really reach the targets we are trying to reach in addressing HIV/AIDS both from prevention and care unless we also address the issue of poverty. And secondly, once it is very critical to have access to medicine, to drugs, to anti-retrovirals, it is equally important for people living with AIDS in affected families to have access to nutrition, to have food at the table. I interacted with the community and what they were raising is yes, medicine, yes, we need treatment, but we need food," she says.
The UNIFEM regional program director in Kenya calls HIV/AIDS a humanitarian emergency. She says the world cannot allow what is already happening in sub-Saharan Africa to happen in Asia and Latin America.
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