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Economic Empowerment for Enhanced Health Equity: A Qualitative Study of Women Living with HIV in Wakiso District, Uganda

Saidah Mbooge Najjuma [email protected] and Helen T. Yates https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8460-1070View all authors and affiliations
Volume 39, Issue 4
https://doi.org/10.1177/08861099241235345

Abstract

Women living with HIV in Sub-Saharan Africa struggle for health equity while also facing the constraints of economic hardship and patriarchy. In this article, we describe the experiences of women who participated in economic empowerment groups for women living with HIV in Wakiso district, Uganda. Fifty women engaged in economic empowerment groups and ten social worker and community health worker key informants enrolled in the study. Taking a phenomenological approach, we used field notes, qualitative interviews, and focus groups with participants and key informants to describe the experiences of the women who joined the groups. We present the findings including enhanced management of HIV and increased property and business ownership due to economic empowerment group participation. We discuss the findings through an economic empowerment framework and offer implications for social work interventions and research.

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Biographies

Saidah Mbooge Najjuma is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Social Sciences at Ndejje University, Uganda. She is the author of Framing Reality: Approaches and Practices to Community Development and was a Fulbright Scholar at UNCW in 2021. Saidah is an OD consultant, and her areas of research are participatory development, social work policy, gender issues and human relations.
Helen T. Yates, MSW, PhD Taylor is an Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work at the College of Health and Human Services in the University of North Carolina Wilmington. She has worked in community mental health, non-profit organizations and private counseling agencies as a clinical social worker and supervisor. Taylor's research interests include understanding the wellness needs of women experiencing chronic illness from a client-centered perspective and evaluating strengths-based behavioral interventions. Her previous research projects include developing and evaluating the Solution Focused Wellness for HIV Intervention for Women – a manualized group counseling program that capitalizes on strengths using client-centered methods. Her current research is aimed at evaluating the efficacy of a Solution Focused Brief Therapy wellness group with people recovering from alcohol and drug abuse, and she is planning to collaborate on a program evaluation with a substance abuse recovery community. Taylor is the Co-chair of the Solution Focused Brief Therapy Association's Research Committee and a member of the Society for Social Work and Research.
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