Social Science Research Council

Research Agenda

As the AIDS pandemic has evolved over the past decade, it has become increasingly clear that the effects will be massive and extend throughout the societies of affected nations. Although more attention has recently been paid to the socio-economic impacts of HIV/AIDS, there is still little research on the dynamic effects of AIDS on households, communities, and economies. Of particular concern in the context of sub-Saharan Africa is the lack of attention to and knowledge of rural economies and the sustainability of rural communities. Regions of Africa have been suffering under multiple stresses to the vitality and, in some cases, viability of the agricultural sector and rural livelihoods—drought and other severe weather patterns and civil strife, among others—and now the steadily mounting burden of AIDS is challenging even previously stable agricultural communities.

The rural economy has long been understood to be a core base from which economic development can be sustained. Rising productivity in agriculture not only provides food for urban workers, but allows for labor to shift to non-agricultural activities. Economically successful rural households provide markets for manufactured goods. In much of Africa, rural communities retain extended family networks, even when adults migrate to urban areas for work, and the remittances from urban labor help sustain them. Eventually, many workers retire back their rural communities. Thus for both the continuing efforts at economic development and the sustainability of rural communities, mitigating the impacts of AIDS will be critical.

The dynamic interactions between AIDS and the agricultural systems that are central to rural communities are among the most worrisome, especially in light of near famine conditions in certain regions for which AIDS bears much of the blame. The loss of the productive members of households forces new and possibly irreversible choices on food production and the sale of assets, such as livestock. It is beginning to be understood that these impacts on individual households can be severe, but the dynamics will eventually challenge whole rural communities. In much of Africa, production activities are communal. Even where they are not, the rising number of orphans; widows with insecure land rights; and rising burdens of care will threaten the social and economic fabrics of rural communities. Understanding these dynamics, and in particular understanding the thresholds beyond which communities can no longer respond effectively, will be critical for targeting interventions.

But at the same time, rural communities are trying to adapt and respond to these new conditions. Although we know that social infrastructures are being challenged, we do not have any systematic assessment of the way that villages are changing under these stresses. We imagine that some will cease to be viable communities as they experience accelerating morbidity and out migration. Others may develop new institutional and social forms that allow, for example, the community to maintain intergenerational learning even as the number of orphans rises. Challenges to economic viability, like decreasing population density and generalized morbidity, may induce economic innovation, or may simply drive rural inhabitants into the cities to maintain themselves.

In addition to challenging the sustainability of rural economies, AIDS is also transforming the social structures of communities. With the breakdown of households and rising number of orphans and those in need of care, villages need to adapt not only to economic burdens, but social ones as well. New processes for transferring knowledge across generations are among the early and best documented social changes. Not just the morbidity of AIDS, but the locus of care and treatment may also be transformative, as sick family members migrate back to rural villages as they become sick, or adults migrate to urban areas for treatment. Little research yet exists to help in understanding the forces at the local level that may lead certain villages or regions to adapt constructively to the stresses of AIDS. How important are local political institutions and community groups? Are there cases where local leadership has proven effective? How might rural communities buffer themselves from the spillovers elsewhere, for example, as employment opportunities diminish or national institutions weaken?


Research Planning

On September 18, 2003, the Council held a planning meeting to discuss the substantive agenda of the impact of HIV/AIDS on rural communities in Africa. In attendance at the meeting were Mary Kay Gugerty (University of Washington), Ted Miguel (Berkeley), Thomas Jayne (Michigan State), Malcolm McPherson (Harvard University), Rebecca Thornton (Harvard University), Ngoni Munemo (Columbia University), Sally Findley (Columbia University), and Council staff Jennifer Klot, Jason McNichol, Ashley Timmer, and Liam Ristow. As background for this meeting, the Council prepared a literature review on the topic of AIDS and Rural Livelihoods, which outlines the key questions and research being done.

In addition to extremely productive substantive discussions, the main output of which is discussed below, the group explored the range of research activities that the Council might undertake in order to further our understanding of these themes. The following outlines some of the key products that the SSRC hopes to support:

1. Innovative Research Methodologies and Models

Understanding the dynamic processes in rural communities will require new approaches, in particular the development of models that take into account individual responses to new conditions as well as the response at the community, regional, and national level. Most social modeling, by necessity, has taken certain ceteris paribus assumptions—treating the institutional structure as fixed, for example, to look at changes elsewhere. But with the rising burden of AIDS, we suspect that all aspects of rural communities are changing, and new theoretical tools will be essential to capture these complexities.

2. Case Studies and Comparative Analysis

Although theoretical work may offer useful predictions and frames, understanding the impacts on rural communities also requires in-depth case studies. Research will benefit both from studying communities as they face the current crises, and from historical episodes of rural stresses (a topic on which there is a substantial literature, especially in rural sociology). We expect that by looking at the current changes within communities across a range of countries in Africa but also in India, the Caribbean, and elsewhere, we may be able to identify some patterns of community adaptation that cannot be seen in numerical data.

3. Data Development and Infrastructure

The modeling and case study work will be most effective combined with an organized effort to bring the existing data together into comparable forms and to coordinate new data collection efforts. There are currently underway several large projects to begin to gather not only prevalence data, but information on the impact on firms, households, and agricultural productivity. Efforts to make data comparable across projects, and available to a wide range of researchers, would allow more synergy across researchers.

4. Academic Resources Among the many concerns of those beginning to look at the socio-economic impacts of AIDS is the lack of scholars with any training in thinking about HIV/AIDS. In large part this reflects the absence of courses and curricula offered in universities that specifically tackle AIDS as a development issue. One immediate priority would be to help build materials for training future cohorts of scholars so that the critical research on AIDS can endure.


A Research Project

Out of our discussions in September, a preliminary research project has emerged, building on some early efforts in the field to examine the impact of HIV/AIDS. Faculty at the meeting and others have been in discussions with us to build a multi-disciplinary study across four research sites in Kenya, Mozambique, and Zambia. As outlined above, there is a clear need to develop better comparative work and coordination of data collection efforts, and this project is being designed not only to add to our understanding of particular communities, but to further our understanding of the comparative context facing different regions and villages across Africa. We see here an opportunity to use coordinated methodologies to look at several communities, not only struggling with varying impacts of HIV/AIDS, but also with different economic, social, and political contexts. In coordinating the methodologies and research plan across sites, we will be able to build comparative analyses across a range of experiences.

The project will build on household surveys in rural communities, and thus will add to our understanding of the impact on households and rural livelihoods, but the novel research output will be an assessment of the community context of these households, and the social structures and economic activities that effect the ability of both households and communities to respond. While there has been a small amount of research looking into the impacts of disability and death at the household level, there is as yet no attempt to understand how these households, in the larger context of their communities, are presenting challenges to long-standing systems of community risk sharing, livelihood strategies, and even the way in which communities are situated within the large context of the region, economically and socially. Moreover, the differential responses of communities—and the correlates of those choices—will offer new insight into supporting hard-hit regions.

The household surveys will establish morbidity and disability, economic and livelihood conditions and choices, and the impact on children and household composition. These household data will form the core of the individual cases, establishing forms and levels of HIV/AIDS burden both within households and for the community in aggregate, and the dynamic changes over time. From these data, for example, we should be able to understand how individual livelihood strategies—from crop choice to migration—are inputs into community-wide patterns of economic adaptation.

We will add to these core surveys community-level research, to understand how the severity and breadth of household impacts is challenging local institutions, social cohesiveness, and livelihood strategies. Understanding the broader context of community life—its connection to local markets, migration networks, clan structures, and leadership—will allow us to move beyond comparative work based merely on averages, and instead examine the structures, networks, and community-wide responses, that predict more resilience. For example, in western Kenya, we will be able to build on baseline work with NGO networks, to look at how the rising burdens of HIV/AIDS are impacting on women’s groups and social cohesion. By layering our measures of the impact on women within households with new evidence on their community roles, we can uncover the interactions between individual burdens and community response and impact.

It is our hypothesis that while household-level impacts are the key data on which to build an assessment of the epidemic, the household absent its context tells us little about the most effective policy response. Rather, understanding how a community of variously-impacted households--collectively managing agricultural production, education expenses, and health care—is itself transformed by its members and by its wider social and political context, will direct us towards better interventions to support the communities and the households within them.