ABSTRACT
The scale and depth of the AIDS crisis has prompted calls to enlist women’s organising capacities and collective energy in campaigns for protection. Women have been targeted partly because they themselves have lined up to assist as primary carers within families, through religious groups offering compassion to those who are sick or bereaved, via informal networks providing mutual support around rites of passage, and through more formal charitable and service organisations, NGOs and community-based organisations. While men are also involved in such activities, their numbers are dwarfed by women fulfilling roles as carers, volunteers and educators, whether in the domestic sphere or the informal and formal sectors of the public sphere.
