Centres and Peripheries

The trip back from Mumias to Nairobi was long, hot and often bumpy. But there were no incidents, flat tyres, etc. Only the usual poorly surfaced roads and traffic jams in Nairobi. It’s only about 350km so nine hours is slow, but not the worst.

Infrastructure is a big problem in Kenya and East Africa in general. So many projects assume a certain level of telephone, mobile, rail and internet connections and quickly run into difficulties.

For example, there are hundreds of internet cafes in Nairobi but try to find one where you can do everything you need to do online and you may have difficulties. I tried today for three and a half hours and just as I was about to compromise and try to achieve only some of my objectives, there was a power failure throughout the city. How long it will last is anyone’s guess.

There is a tantalising possibility that the poor roads in Kenya, Tanzania and other countries played a part in protecting many people from becoming infected with HIV early on in the epidemic. People in more isolated areas were not infected in large numbers in the early years.

However, that is not the case any more. As mentioned in the last few days, people in rural areas and more isolated areas in both Kenya and Tanzania are being infected now in greater numbers than before. They are not receiving the prevention education that is sometimes found in towns and cities and testing facilities are scarce or non-existent.

Countries with relatively good infrastructures sometimes have much higher HIV prevalence than Kenya or Tanzania. Examples of this phenomenon are Zimbabwe, Malawi, South Africa and Botswana. Of course, there are probably other reasons why HIV prevalence is so much worse there, but demographic balance, mobility and circular migration play an important part in the transmission of HIV.

One of the reasons why urbanization may be so strongly associated with high and fast transmission rates of HIV is the high number of males in urban populations. Botswana, one of the richest countries in Africa, with one of the highest rates of HIV in the world, has also experienced rapid urbanization, economic growth, population growth, high levels of income inequality, a history of mobility and high levels of commerce with surrounding countries.

Botswana's economy depends to a large extent on extractive industries and they, typically, employ large numbers of men who live in all-male accommodation. This results in high levels of commercial sex and a consequently increased risk of contracting and spreading HIV and other STIs.

Employees are not just from Botswana, so when they return home, they can transmit HIV and other conditions to their home countries, which are often poor, with high unemployment rates.

Ok, Kenya doesn’t have a lot of mining, certainly not on the same scale as Botswana. But there are industries that give rise to circular migration and the resulting demographic imbalances and consequent spread of HIV and other diseases.

Kenya’s number one product is tea. As mentioned, Mumias is dominated by the sugar industry. Some coastal areas grow little but sisal. And there are natural resources here, such as soda and uranium. Other examples are the massive cut flower businesses around Lake Naivasha and the fruit and vegetable growing farms.

All these industries depend on large supplies of casual labour, very often for only part of the year. People arrive and stay for as long as the work lasts and then go back to their homes. Many of these economic migrants are male and they live away from their families for much of the year.

This kind of circular migration, often driven by rural poverty, is common in developing countries and is associated with many health hazards, for example, TB. Labour practices in South African diamond and gold mines result in similar conditions and again, the HIV related effects were transmitted to surrounding countries that suffered worse HIV prevalence than that of South Africa.

Eileen Stillwaggon, in AIDS and the Ecology of Poverty, talks of the “circular migrant streams” that are fuelled by mines, factories and plantations and the consequent slums and shanty towns with their poor sanitation and high rates of disease and malnutrition. It must also be noted that circular migration transmitted HIV from urban to rural regions in earlier years but later the transmission was in both directions.

John Iliffe, in A History of the African AIDS Epidemic, cites the “male predominance in urban populations” in East Africa as one of the reasons why levels of infection were higher there than in western equatorial Africa. In the early 1990s, “Kigali had 50 per cent more men than women aged 20-39” (page 21). In Nairobi in 1979 there were 138 males for every 100 females, the imbalance was even higher among adults and many of the males were unmarried.

A high male to female ratio in the population does not just affect urban dwellers. Fishing communities in rural areas around Lake Victoria were predominantly male and HIV rates there are very high. Nyanza province has the worst HIV rates in Kenya. Rural dwellers are also affected by these imbalances because the migration is temporary and people come and go, perhaps for much of their working life.

There are also certain occupations that involve high levels of mobility. Iliffe mentions urban immigrants, truck drivers, alluvial miners, their female partners and labour migration as examples of particularly mobile groups. Towns along trade routes often have higher rates of HIV than other towns.

This problem is especially prominent at borders. Border controls are very slow moving and truckers often have to spend several days in border towns because of slow administrative procedures. It can be cheaper for them to stay with a casual partner there than to put up in a hotel, so it’s an ideal place for commercial sex workers to look for business.

These are all major factors in the history of the transmission of HIV in Kenya and East Africa in general. They crop up constantly in the literature and mobile people were among the first ‘vulnerable groups’ to be studied, along with commercial sex workers.

It was Zimbabwe's “excellent transport system” and circular internal migration between urban and rural areas that transmitted HIV out into rural areas, according to Iliffe (page 39). In the case of Malawi, Iliffe makes a further connection between higher education and greater mobility, perhaps elucidating the phenomenon of higher HIV prevalence sometimes being associated with higher levels of education.

Iliffe tracks the transmission of HIV from Western Equatorial Africa to East Africa, Southern Africa and West Africa. He makes it clear that mobility is the chief driver of the epidemic at the regional level.

Indeed, obstacles to mobility from east to west is one of the possible reasons Iliffe suggests as to why West Africa's epidemic was less severe than that of some other African regions. Where HIV rates were high in West Africa, one of the principle drivers was mobility, especially among commercial sex workers.

Tantalising as it is to suggest that poor infrastructure reduces the spread of HIV, it is not really true. It is true, but trivially so, that complete isolation is a protection against HIV and any other transmissible disease. In reality, people are not completely isolated, even in the most remote parts of Kenya.

Isolation explains why HIV spread slowly to rural areas and more quickly and earlier in cities and densely populated areas. It also demonstrates the critical situation that many towns, villages and rural areas are in, right now.

The situation is critical because we really don’t know what HIV prevalence is in more remote areas. People there are less exposed to HIV prevention publicity, they have less access to health and other social services and especially, to voluntary counselling and testing centres.

The further people are from urban centres, the more isolated they are, the less we know about HIV rates in those areas. The difference in prevalence between urban and rural areas may be merely apparent.