Columbia Missourian: In South Africa, where one in four is unemployed and half the population lives in poverty, many rural households are being held together by older women who rely on government pensions to feed, clothe and shelter large extended families, according to research conducted in Agincourt, South Africa, by an MU professor and colleagues from the University of Colorado and the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.
Enid Schatz, director of social science research at MU’s School of Health Professions, and fellow researchers set out to determine whether an older woman who had had an AIDS death in her household suffered greater economic stress than those who did not. The results showed that the burden of caring for adult children and grandchildren in rural South Africa is falling on many older women, not just those whose families have experienced a death from AIDS.
“We expected to find very different situations, but we found more commonality,” Schatz said. “You don’t have to have an AIDS death in
your household to be affected.”
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