I just read this article called “African Girls Getting World Bank Cash Deters Sugar Daddies.”
In case the term sugar daddy is only vaguely familiar: it officially describes a rich, older man who gives gifts or money to a young woman in exchange for sexual favors or companionship. In the realm of HIV/AIDS, it gives a partial explanation as to why young women aged 15 to 24 (in sub-saharan Africa) have infection rates that are three times higher than young men in the same age group.
The article presents the results from a couple of randomized studies that gave cash incentives to female youth and measured the impact on their sexual behaviors and rates of infection. In Malawi, about 3,800 young women aged 13 to 22 were enrolled. Here is what they found:
One group got an average of $10 a month and payment for school fees if they regularly attended class. The others got nothing. A year and a half after the program began, infection rates were 60 percent lower among school girls who got cash: 1.2 percent, compared with 3 percent.
Isn’t that unbelievable? There was also a delay in sexual onset and decreases in sexual acts and sexual partners. For just $10 a month.
The article goes on to describe the debate over implementation and consequences over such a prevention strategy. There is a part of me that reads all this and wants to send money over there straightaway and make an instant difference in these young girls’ lives. To protect their precious bodies and to keep them from unintended pregnancies and to keep them in school for a brighter future.
The other part of me is thinking of the concepts of When Helping Hurts, my own god complex, and the fact that money isn’t the answer to all our problems. I think about the problems of dependency, paternalism, consequences when the money runs out, jealousy for those who won’t get money… and the abuse, neglect, and inequality that are left painfully unaddressed.
Then I think about the autonomy that it might give a young girl to have money to buy food and other necessities that her family is unable to provide. I’m not even talking luxury items; I’m talking about toiletries and maxi pads. She’d be free to go to school and have a regular life without having to give herself away to a man she doesn’t care for.
I have to also admit that the impact that $10 a month makes is probably rather precarious. What are the deeper layers of behavior change that are not touched by money? Questions of intimacy, pleasure, comfort, priorities… these are things that underlie so many risky or harmful behaviors. Smoking, overeating, lack of exercise, gambling, obsessive social networking. Why do we do the things we ought not do and not do the things we ought to? Things are just not as simple and easy as we’d sometimes like to think.
When it’s all said and done, I do believe God is at work. I believe that even in this world that is going to pot and breaking our hearts every day, we can see God transforming lives, drawing us into his kingdom and expanding it before our eyes. $10 a month isn’t what’s going to save souls. It may be a tool to rescue girls from falling deeper into despair and death, to give them a chance to breathe and be found by Christ and experience fullness in him. Yeah. That’s the ultimate goal, isn’t it?
Cheers,
helen
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