After over 10 years of stability, Nigeria’s HIV gender gap is widening and it doesn’t favor women
According to the recently released Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) report for 2018, there are more women in Nigeria living with HIV- particularly adolescent girls and young women – than men.
Nearly 3 out of 5 people living with HIV in Nigeria are women, this estimate is higher than the sub-Saharan Africa narrative.
The report revealed that Nigeria now has 1.6 million HIV-infected women in Nigeria in comparison to 1.3 million men in 2017.
While this disproportionate distribution of the HIV infection is a trend that has been seen over the years, the gap has widened in the past 10 years and experts attributed it to a deeply rooted and widespread culture of gender inequality.
There is gender bias in education and restricted social autonomy among women which had resulted in an inferior female access to reproductive health services, including HIV testing and treatment.
Furthermore, practices such as female genital mutilation, denial of women’s access to inheritance, widowhood rites, encouragement of multiple sexual partners for males, and marriage of young girls to much older men have also been associated with the trend.
In a country like Nigeria that has the second largest HIV/AIDS epidemic in the world and one of the highest rates of re-infection, public health experts had repeatedly noted that the importance of mainstreaming gendered HIV/AIDS interventions cannot be overemphasized.
Attention has been drawn to the urgent need to address Nigeria’s gender gap in the HIV/AIDS burden through HIV programming.
Experts added that reducing violence and coercion, improving women’s access to health services and their autonomy, and increasing legal protection for women and girls, must be areas of focus for reducing HIV risk among women and girls in coming years. Failure to do so will only ensure that the gap will continue to widen.