“HIV/AIDS is increasingly being recognised as not merely a medical problem, but a social problem as well. The latter requires and understanding of the determinants of risk behaviour and factors influencing behaviour changes… (Mawar et al 2005:471).”  Freudenthal (2001) argues that though much is known, there are research gaps and motivates for the need to research on specific socio-economic contexts.  Although HIV/AIDS was first described from a Ugandan fishing village on the shores of Lake Victoria in 1982 (Serwardda et al. 1985), the social, cultural and economic understandings of it had been absent from fisheries. Research conducted by Allison and Seeley (2004), and Seeley and Allison (2005) attempts to understand the vulnerability of fishing communities to HIV/AIDS. They attribute the fishing communities’ vulnerabilities to their mobility – migration, time away from home, access to cash income, commercial sex at landing ports, and hyper-masculinity. In addition, the subordinate economic and social position of women (gender) adds to their vulnerability in fishing communities (Allison and Seeley, 2004). In HIV/AIDS research the primacy is given to quantitative over qualitative methods. The main shortcoming of quantitative research methods, such as questionnaires and surveys, is that it is unable to elicit in deep understandings about the beliefs, norms and practices of HIV/AIDS, the social, cultural and economic context in which the transmission takes place. There is an urgent need to investigate alternative methods of socioeconomic and cultural conditions increasing the vulnerability to HIV/AIDS. Such conditions include the inequality of gender and the lack of power of poor groups, isolated persons, migrant males, female sexual workers, men engaging in sexual relations with other men, among others.

The objective of the research project is ‘to undertake in-depth analysis on the link between HIV/Aids, poverty and gender, the nature of underlying factors influencing the HIV risk and Aids impacts, and the potential social and economic impacts of HIV/AIDS on selected fishing communities in South Africa. Among others, the project will investigate the following research questions:

In the end, it is hoped that the research will improve and deepen our knowledge about the causes and impacts of HIV/Aids in fishing communities and the linkages between poverty and HIV/Aids in the fisheries sector and contribute towards informed development policies and strategies for dealing with this serious problem. This research is funded through the bilateral agreement between Norway and Department of Environmental Affairs Tourism’s department Marine and Coastal Management and it is hoped that the project would come up with management considerations of the impact of HIV/Aids in fisheries.