Aids threat for Zambian girls

Penny Dale
BBC Africa Live!

More than 20% of Zambians are HIV positive

Chileshe Banda is an 18-year-old Zambian living in the capital Lusaka.

According to research, her chances of becoming infected with the HIV virus are about five times greater than those of one of her male friends.

Chileshe says she has only had sex once before and then she used a condom because she did not want to get either pregnant or infected with the HIV virus.

But she says she has plenty of friends - some younger than she is - who do not practise safe sex.

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"The first time my friends had sex they did use a condom but then they stopped because their boyfriends told them that they wanted to go 'live'," Chileshe says.

"When I asked them why they agreed to stop using a condom, despite knowing the risks, they told me they found it difficult to say no. They were scared that if they did their boyfriends would leave them."

Mobile phones

Quite often boyfriends are much older - sometimes in their 40s or 50s. Often they are also married.

These so-called "sugar daddies" are hardly a new phenomenon, but they are, according to research published last year in the medical journal The Lancet, fuelling the HIV/Aids pandemic in Africa because they have unprotected sex with numerous people.

Sometimes girls simply want the thrill of sex with older men, because they are thought by many girls to be better in bed than boys their own age.

Many young girls cannot resist sugar daddies

In Zambia, as elsewhere, the latest craze is the mobile or cellphone.

Young girls are willing to have unprotected sex with much older men in exchange for the latest mobile phone and a steady flow of top-up airtime cards.

"Many of the girls at my school want those small cellphones, not the big ones, and the only way to get them is to have sex, often without a condom, with these older men," Chileshe says.

Good grades

Sexual relationships between schoolgirls and their teachers has also heightened the risk of HIV infection for young girls.

Sixteen-year-old schoolgirl Mulenga Mwale describes how she used to have sex with a teacher until she realised that the teacher was having sex with three other girls.

"I liked him and I wanted to get good grades in class so after he asked me several times I agreed to have sex with him. At first, we used a condom but then he wanted to stop so I did."

"But the next term I found out that he was also having sex with a friend of mine, also not using a condom, so I stopped altogether."