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Labour Union Declares Unemployment Level A Crisis

Poverty Forces Teenage Girls Into High Risk Sex

By Anthony Mukwita

LUSAKA, June 2000 (IPS)-It is close to mid-night at a popular nightspot called Alfa bar here in the Zambian capital and things are just beginning to happen.

Rave music, popular among many of the youth in Lusaka's night clubs, blares loudly as the revellers, mostly in their teens, get into the party mood. Among them is 16 year old Malita Ngoma (not her real name) who has been in the pub since the doors opened for business about 17:00 hours.

She is a seventh grade school drop out whose father is unemployed and her mother is illiterate. Her main reason for dropping out of school is not much different from that cited by many teen-age drop-outs in this southern African country - poverty.

Malita's father was, until last year, a respected civil servant. He lost his job as part of the ambitious government recovery programme, the Public Sector Reform Programme (PSRP) adopted shortly after Zambia returned to multi-party politics in 1991.

The PSRP is one of the programmes the Zambian government has embarked on to achieve economic recovery after years of socialism. Under the PSRP, sponsored by the World Bank, the government intends to cut some 80,000 public service jobs in a bid to streamline operations, improve the perks of those remaining and make the sector more service oriented.

But, however, well intended the programme might appear, evidence on the ground shows that it has left behind a trail of misery and destroyed the future of many a young girls like Malita who have resorted to sex work as a way of earning a living.

Today it is not strange to find a bunch of girl's aged between 15 and 19, sometimes even younger, selling their bodies to earn a livelihood in a harsh liberalised economy.

This is not exactly a pleasant phenomenon for Zambia, which already is one of the sub Saharan African countries worst hit by the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

The disease has already claimed over 650, 000 lives since it became an epidemic in the early 1980's according to available statistics from the Central Board of Health (CBH). Studies show that teenage girls are more likely to contract the disease than their male counterparts as they are more sexually active especially with old men (sugar daddies) who find them 'cheaper, cleaner and less exposed to disease'.

A recent documentary aired on national television revealed that young girls would have sex with a man, with or without a condom for as little as 10, 000 kwacha, about three US dollars.

According to the latest CBH report: "Young women in the 15-19 age group are five times as likely to be infected as males in the same age groups..." Government studies estimate that about 110, 000 deaths from HIV/AIDS will be recorded per year in Zambia by the year 2004 while the number is expected to increase to about 132, 000 a year in 2014.

The majority of these are expected to be teenage girls and women.

At present, two out of every three deaths in the age group between 15 and 49, both men and women, are as a consequent of HIV/AIDS. By the year 2004, when Zambia ironically hopes to reduce poverty levels from 80 percent to 50 percent, at least 210 Zambians will be dying from the scourge in this dirt-poor country every single day.

The government says it recognises the importance of: "establishing programmes for both in and out-of-school youth" in the draft national strategic plan on HIV/AIDS after realising that most of the efforts have in fact been directed at the adults and not the youth.

But until such efforts translate into reality, anti-aids campaigners fear that more and more young girls in Zambia will lose their lives to the HIV/AIDS scourge before they are given an opportunity to become responsible citizens who can contribute to the economic development of their country.

At the same time, the government's radical economic recovery programme has left many people jobless and made women and girl children more vulnerable than they were before.

Some commentators feel the situation might improve once the majority of Zambians are economically empowered. But this, too, seems to be a long shot because the Zambian economic recovery programme is presently taking away more jobs than it is creating.