ABSTRACT
HIV/AIDS swept the globe in the late 1990s at an alarming pace. By 2000, there were over 36 million people living with HIV/AIDS, 70 percent of whom were in sub-Saharan Africa. South Africa bore the brunt of the disease burden, with a thousand people dying of AIDS every day in 2007 (Coovadia et al. 2009). The magnitude of the crisis ushered in a global response, in which both public and private donors pledged billions of dollars towards a multitude of interventions to lessen the epidemic’s impact. One prominent type of intervention promoted across Africa was home-and community-based care. It was based on evidence that, as the epidemic surged, hundreds of mostly women were self-organizing and taking care of sick and dying family members and neighbors in localities across Africa. Such celebrated accounts led to donor financing of a ‘care agenda’ and, in turn, the expansion of home-and community-based care programs (Ogden et al. 2006).
