IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/deveza/v26y2009i1p95-109.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Caregivers' sacrifices: the opportunity costs of adult morbidity and mortality for female pensioners in rural South Africa

Author

Listed:
  • Catherine Ogunmefun
  • Enid Schatz

Abstract

This paper explores the financial and opportunity costs of adult morbidity and mortality for rural South African female pensioners in the era of HIV/AIDS. As mortality rates from HIV/AIDS and other causes escalate, older women are bearing the brunt of caregiving responsibilities for the sick and orphaned. They often use their state-funded non-contributory pensions to support kin during crises. Interviews conducted with 30 women aged 60-75 years in the Medical Research Council/University of the Witwatersrand Unit (Agincourt) study site in northeastern South Africa revealed that, to cover expenses incurred during crises, older women sometimes forgo spending money and time on their personal needs. They are thus negatively affected as individuals, while contributing positively to the household. Despite the additional household income from pensions, many of the study respondents still found it difficult to recover from the financial impact of these crises.

Suggested Citation

  • Catherine Ogunmefun & Enid Schatz, 2009. "Caregivers' sacrifices: the opportunity costs of adult morbidity and mortality for female pensioners in rural South Africa," Development Southern Africa, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 26(1), pages 95-109.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:deveza:v:26:y:2009:i:1:p:95-109
    DOI: 10.1080/03768350802640123
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03768350802640123
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/03768350802640123?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Makhosazane Ntuli & Sphiwe Madiba, 2019. "The Burden of Caring: An Exploratory Study of the Older Persons Caring for Adult Children with AIDS-Related Illnesses in Rural Communities in South Africa," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 16(17), pages 1-14, August.
    2. Schatz, Enid & Gómez-Olivé, Xavier & Ralston, Margaret & Menken, Jane & Tollman, Stephen, 2012. "The impact of pensions on health and wellbeing in rural South Africa: Does gender matter?," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 75(10), pages 1864-1873.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:deveza:v:26:y:2009:i:1:p:95-109. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/CDSA20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.