Sex Workers

The female condom - currently the only female-controlled method of preventing HIV - is rarely available to women who need it. Blaming poor marketing and insufficient investment, activists at the International AIDS Conference in Mexico City said failure to promote the female condom had hurt global HIV prevention efforts.

"When the female condom first came to us, it was marketed to sex workers, women in bars, and other women thought to be at high risk of HIV or to have loose morals," said Gladys Chiwome, of Zimbabwe's Women and AIDS Support Network, which promotes the use of the female condom in the southern African nation. "As a result, women who thought they were safe, such as married women, were, and still are, reluctant to use it."

Money and men are in no short supply in the petroleum-rich Angolan enclave of Cabinda. Workers from the petroleum industry, truck drivers, merchants and some 60,000 soldiers and police are based in the area; and sex workers from the country's poor and unstable neighbours are crossing Cabinda's porous borders, trying to make ends meet.