1.2 billion persons are forced to live on less than one dollar a day. Poverty and gender are inextricably intertwined. Women and girls are disproportionately represented among the poor. Seventy percent of the world's poor are women. It is poor women who are most susceptible to HIV infections, for gender alone does not define risk.
Poor people are really impoverished people.
They are impoverished by inequitable socioeconomic structures on the household level, on the village level, on the national level, and on the international level of trade and commerce. The epidemiological relationship between migration and HIV is well established. In neighboring villages where men had not migrated less than one percent of the people were HIV positive. In some places female sex workers return, also with some money and often HIV, and in search of a husband. With their wages, usually ready availability of liquor, and peer support, they induce women into either short or longer-term sexual relations.