ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that any effective engagement with HIV/AIDS in Africa must simultaneously engage with the continent's economic decline, if it is to be effective and sustainable. The economic indicators from the African Development Report 2002 underline the extent of the continent's economic decline. The scale of the continent's economic decline is brought into even sharper focus by looking at the latest indicators from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). The mining community in Carletonville, South Africa, is a tragic but powerful reminder of how mobility provides an environment of extraordinary risk for HIV contraction. Poverty structures not only the contours of the pandemic, but also the outcome once an individual is sick with complications of HIV infection. Although the proximate cause of Africa's AIDS crisis is HIV, the underlining societal causes are much broader and familiar.
