negotiate (unprotected) sex. The peak of HIV prevalence is at older ages in Zimbabwe (at 35 to 39 years for women and at 40 to 44 years for men), compared to Lesotho and Swaziland. That peak is generally earlier for women than for men, with the exception of Lesotho, where the highest HIV prevalence rate is recorded in the age group between 30-34 years among men (41%) and in the age group between 35-39 years for women (43%). This figure may reflect an earlier sexual debut of Basotho males.<sup>9</sup>

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The DHS investigate the main type of occupation in the male sample and the partners’ main type of occupation in the female sample. More precisely, in the latter, the survey asks the husband’s/partner’s occupation to currently married or cohabiting women or the last husband’s/partner’s occupation to formerly married women, widowers or formerly cohabiting couples. By construction, we do not have information about the partner’s occupation of women who never married or never cohabited. Unfortunately, the questionnaire did not elicit information on the last type of job for unemployed respondents and unemployed partners. Table 1 shows HIV prevalence rates, by employment status for men and women's partners in the sample. The type of occupation is defined similarly across surveys and it allows a comparison of HIV prevalence by employment status across countries.

When pooling the observations for Lesotho, Swaziland and Zimbabwe, approximately 4 percent of the sample currently works in the mines. The most prevalent occupation is selfemployment in agriculture (15.45 percent), followed by skilled manual jobs (14.19%) and occupation in the service sector (6.78 percent). The fraction of unemployed respondents is massive and almost equal to 40 percent. Looking at the sample of women, the fraction of unemployed partners decreases at 10.2 percent and working in the mines is the most common type of occupation (14.9 percent) after self-employment in agriculture (17.2 percent). The discrepancy between the fraction of miners in the men sample and the fraction of partners working in the mines in the women sample likely reflects the absence of miners during the survey. Indeed, as previously highlighted, DHS enumerators selected individuals present in the household in the night before the survey and, due to their temporary migration to South Africa, miners are obviously less likely to be present. Therefore, the proportion of miners might be severely underestimated and the sample of interviewed miners not fully representative.<sup>10</sup> We also expect a fraction of former mineworkers among the unemployed respondents. Indeed, as stated in the previous section, the average low level of formal education among formerly miners limited their chances to be employed in other occupations. The highest share of miners is recorded in Zimbabwe (4.95 percent), while the highest fraction of women with a partner employed in the mines is in Lesotho (31.5 percent). The mining activities are different in Lesotho and Swaziland compared to Zimbabwe, which is characterized by

> 9In Lesotho, the average age at the first sexual relation is 15 years old for men and 17 years old for women (author’s calculations based on Lesotho Demographic and Health Survey, 2004). 10For example, data from the Lesotho Census 1996 reveal a fraction of male miners equal to 10%, while the same figure collected during the Census 2006 is equal to 4.8 %. Given the decreasing number of miners over time (see figure 2), we would expect a percentage of miners in Lesotho in 2004 between 10% and 4.8%, at least two times higher than the percentage of miners estimated in the Lesotho DHS (3.1%).

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