Interaction between HIV Awareness, Knowledge, Safe Sex Practice and HIV Incidence: Evidence from Botswana

This paper makes methodological and empirical contributions to the study of HIV awareness, knowledge, incidence and safe sex practice in the context of Botswana, one of the most HIV prone countries in the world. While the focus is on Botswana, the paper presents comparable evidence from India to put the Botswana results in perspective. The results point to the strong role played by affluence and education in increasing HIV knowledge, promoting safe sex and reducing HIV incidence. The study presents African evidence on the role played by the empowerment of women in promoting safe sex practices such as condom use. The Botswana results show however that simply increasing HIV knowledge may not be effective in lowering HIV incidence unless people are also made fully aware of the lethal nature of the disease. The lack of significant association between HIV incidence and safe sex practice points to the danger of HIV infected individuals spreading the disease through multiple sex partners and unprotected sex. This danger is underlined by the result that females with multiple sex partners are at higher risk of being infected with HIV.