Assessing the Impact of Socio-economic HIV Driving Factors in Ghana: Rural Versus Urban

William Akotam Agangiba, M. Agangiba

Abstract


For several decades, HIV/AIDS has been an important concern to key international and intergovernmental organisations and a subject of many academic research efforts. Since its emergence in the early 1980s, the devastating effects of the HIV/AIDS pandemic on human life across the world cannot be overemphasised. In the academic front, many researchers have identified important socio-economic drivers of the pandemic, particularly, in sub-Saharan Africa which is the most hard-hit. Some of the socio-economic drivers identified include educational level, marital status and occupation. However, beyond the identification of these factors, not much effort has been made to assess their degree of impact on the lives of a given population. This paper contributes to fill this gap in literature. Assessing the degree of impact of such factors in numerical measures is imperative not only to compare the extent of the impact of individual factors but more importantly to facilitate the development of policies to counter the devastating effects of the pandemic.  Using data mining approach, this paper assesses the impact of HIV/AIDS driving factors and compares the impact of such factors in the urban areas with their impact in the rural areas in Ghana. The results show that some driving factors which are very important in the rural settings do not constitute significant driving factors in the urban settings and vice versa.


Keywords


HIV/AIDS, Pandemic, Socio-economic, Degree of impact, Driving factors

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References


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