Money for Sex

Bernadette Mundele (pictured) works as a counselor at an MSF-run Kinshasa health clinic – the Centre de Santé Biso na Biso – for commercial sex workers in Kinshasa.

The clinic caters mostly to women who have been pushed into the work by extreme poverty, who see the work as their only avenue for earning money to feed and house themselves. The center’s educators travel to the most impoverished areas of Kinshasa to talk about HIV/AIDS, sexually transmitted diseases, condoms, and the resources available through the clinic.

At the clinic itself, seminars are held in the mornings to communicate the same information, information is collected about the patients, medical examinations are conducted and treatments prescribed. The clinic also provides medical services to the children of the sex workers.

According to Bernadette, awareness among sex workers about HIV/AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases, as well as the importance of condom use in preventing infection, has increased significantly since she began working as a counselor since 1988.

The HIV/AIDS infection rate in the Democratic Republic of Congo is estimated at between three and four percent, and 17 percent among patients of the clinic. According to research published by USAID in 2004, between 1985 and 1997, infection rates among sex workers in Kinshasa ranged from 27 to 38%. Perhaps surprisingly, given its problems in virtually every other area, the D.R. Congo has been a leader in combating HIV/AIDS, and was one of the first African countries to recognize the problem, starting in 1983 to register cases.

By comparison, the South African National HIV Survey, published in 2005, showed that 10.8 percent of South Africans over two years old were HIV positive. A South African Department of Health Study in 2007 estimated that 28 percent of pregnant women in the country were HIV positive.