The Innovative and Collective Capacity of Low-Income East African Women in the Era of HIV/AIDS: Contesting Western Notions of African Women

Abstract

Historically, African women have been viewed through a colonizing and Eurocentric lens emphasizing poverty, oppression, and suffering. A postcolonial, feminist approach to our two qualitative studies with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-infected women in Malawi and Kenya led us to depart from this discourse, highlighting women's capacity. Through this article, not only is a forum created for African women's voices to be heard as subaltern knowledge leading to transformational change, but also health care providers are made aware, through women's words, of how they might capitalize on grassroots women's movements, particularly in resource-poor communities, to implement effective HIV prevention and treatment strategies.