Background/Context

Located on the edge of Lake Victoria, women and girls of the community are often pressured by fishermen to pay for goods with transactional sex. This helps explain why almost half of the population has AIDS. As Dr. Eric Green of New York University, a community psychologist and experienced mapper, explained at Duke University’s “Tech and New Media Tuesdays”, cartography can be used to study the relationship between place and health. According to him, there is an emerging consensus within the research community that effective AIDS prevention programs must go beyond a focus on individuals to target the broader family, social, cultural, and environmental factors that influence behavioral decisions. Sometimes teaching people about HIV and how to avoid it is not enough. The conditions in which people are living keep them from changing their behaviors. This means that interventions that transform these conditions can sometimes be more powerful than information as a mechanism for reducing AIDS prevalence. Harnessing the power of geographic information systems (“an integrated set of tools and methodologies for collecting, storing, retrieving, analyzing, and displaying spatial as well as non-spatial information”) to visualize local knowledge regarding the interplay between the physical environment and behaviors that correlate with high risk for AIDS can help researchers design such intervention programs specifically for the needs of the local community. This summer, the CHAMP team set out to create a map that would serve this purpose.