"Gogos" Giving: Female Pensioners Relationships with Their Households in the HIV/AIDS Era.

This project explores the coping strategies of households in rural South Africa, where HIV/AIDS morbidity and mortality are having profound effects on household resources. Female pensioners are playing an important role in sustaining and maintaining multi-generational households. This paper explores this issue through the voices of 30 female pensioners. We conducted semi-structured interviews with residents in the Agincourt Health and Demographic Surveillance System fieldsite. Using verbal autopsy data, we were able to sample 10 women from each of three types of households: those that had experienced 1) an HIV/AIDS death, 2) another type of adult death, or 3) no death. Although most of the pensioners believed that the rightful use of their pensions was to benefit the entire household, the extent to which households relied on the pension depended on the number of working adults, number of dependent children, and the extent of recent medical crises in the household. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]