HIV will impact on social relations in the household and in the community.

Household

We have already seen in the previous pages that HIV/AIDS affects household relations as children and older people may be required to take over household work from adults who are too ill to carry on working.

HIV/AIDS also has a big impact on the household when parents die. In areas where HIV/AIDS is prevalent, there are often large numbers of orphans whose parents have died as a result of the disease.

Orphans who are too young to look after themselves may be looked after by grandparents or other relatives. Where children are cared for by other relatives or friends, some households become much larger and more complex.

However, in Africa, the number of orphans has risen so much that the traditional ways of coping with this problem by other relatives looking after them is not always possible. One result of this problem of large numbers of orphans, is the increasing number of homeless street children in many African towns.

Community

Because HIV/AIDS results in early death, communities in areas with high rates of the disease will have to deal with constant sorrow and feelings of loss as funerals become a common occurrence.

As health and economic conditions get worse, the problems caused by HIV/AIDS can also lead to the feeling within the community that it is in serious trouble. This can then lead to growing tensions within the community.

We have seen that some households may be seriously affected by HIV/AIDS as they become unable to work the land and provide food. In contrast though, households where no family members contract the disease may benefit as they may take over the land which has been left abandoned by other people.

This means that HIV/AIDS creates a big and usually growing gap in terms of income and food availability between those households in which key members have the disease and those which don't.

Picture of a house in a cultivated maize field in Kenya.