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Interview with Dr Garth Japhet, Executive Director, Soul City, South Africa, and social entrepreneur, ahead of the World Economic forum on Africa 2006 meeting.
 Media has been used to impact society on sensitive issues such as HIV/AIDS. How can the media be used to impact government and its policies?
We don’t just use television. We use a multimedia approach and have done so over many years and what we’ve been able to do - because we reach so many people and have become a very credible voice – is to use the credibility that our media presence gives us to actually become an advocacy voice which clearly is around policy etc.
So for us media is a springboard and we use advocacy tactics, but it does give us credibility. Without our television, radio and print run backup we really wouldn’t have the voice which we have at the moment to actually interact as a stakeholder with government.
Peter Piot from UNAIDS said at Davos that social behaviour is the driving force behind the HIV/AIDS epidemic. What social behaviours need to be changed in South Africa?
Social behaviour drives the epidemic across the world and a lot of things are common across the world, particularly the situation of multiple partners, again not unique to South Africa.
There is a culture of older men going out with younger women which from a medical point of view is extremely dangerous given the vulnerability of young women. It has also led to a disproportionately high level of HIV infection in young women compared to young men.
Then I think there is the culture around the role of women within any relationship and the discrepancy between her power and a man’s power to negotiate sex and relationships in general. Again all of these things are not completely unique to South Africa.
There is some new work that is not entirely proven but is quite interesting around the concept which perhaps has been driven by the migrant labour system where people have what they call ‘concomitant’ or ‘concurrent’ partners which involve fairly safe relationships but with more than one person at the same time. That fuels the epidemic because of the web that gets created. Rather than a serial monogamy you’ve got somebody who maybe has two to three fairly stable partners but all concurrently.
Also, clearly a culture where violence against woman is seen as normative by many men and women is one of the key issues that deserves our attention. The world view that drives this behaviour is also the world view which allows a woman little say in negotiating for safer sex or no sex. However, changing this world view is the responsibility of both men and women.
You have said that women can provide the answer to changing social behaviour and that although they are often at a disadvantage in gender relations, they are not as helpless as they are often portrayed. Can you expand on this?
The reality is that men’s socialization is part of the problem. Particularly in our society, a lot of young men are brought up by women. And in terms of what men are taught to be and expect in their relationships with women they often learn that from their mothers who buy in to a particular concept of manhood. So in terms of raising a generation of men who look at women differently, I think women have a huge role to play. Many people in the field in this region of the world would agree with me. I’m not a maverick voice in that respect.
And the other thing is that there is very much an economic understanding that sex is transactional, that relationships are not so much about the relational aspect of things (and this is by no means universal) and that sex is part of an economic system where he brings home the money and she provides the sex. Clearly it is within a women’s power to start looking at herself in a different way, i.e. the self-esteem of the women to actually say ‘I am my own meal ticket’ instead of looking to a man for that.
So it’s more about buying in to an existing culture and about the way in which our society is socialized and about the women’s role in actually changing that.
Some companies offer HIV/AIDS testing and treatment programmes for their employees. Does Soul City have an AIDS in the workplace programme?
We provide materials which are used by a lot of AIDS in the workplace programmes. We have our own workplace programme for Soul City itself so it’s all very well us telling other people what to do but we have it for our own staff. We have a comprehensive treatment, care and support programme internally.
Then a number of external providers use Soul City materials in their own workplace programmes. I think we are probably the most used set of materials across South Africa. |
