Household Wealth, Travel Associated with Having Multiple Partners Among Sub-Saharan African Men (Digests) (Report‪)‬

The likelihood that a man will have multiple sex partners--a key factor promoting the spread of HIV--may be mediated by his financial resources and his exposure to social control mechanisms, such as monitoring by village elders and family members. (1) In many of the 15 Sub-Saharan African countries included in a recent study, the odds of having had multiple partners in the previous 12 months were elevated among men with greater household wealth and those with nonagricultural occupations. In addition, the odds of having had multiple partners were frequently elevated among men who were relatively free from social control because they lived alone or traveled away from home; for example, Ethiopian men who had taken six or more long trips in the past year, including at least one that lasted a month, were far more likely than nontravelers to have had multiple partners (odds ratio, 8.1). The researcher used self-reported data on men aged 15-49 from Demographic and Health Surveys conducted in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Cote d'Ivoire, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guinea, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Mali, Niger, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania and Zambia. He excluded men in polygynous marriages, who accounted for 1% (in Rwanda) to 15% (in Guinea) of men in that age range. Respondents reported their marital status, their age at first sex and the number of sex partners they had had in the 12 months prior to the interview. The key socioeconomic variables included in the study were household wealth (categorized in quintiles), education (none, some primary, completed primary, some secondary or completed secondary) and employment status (student, unemployed or employed in one of seven broad occupational categories). In addition, the researcher used three indicators of social control mechanisms that might affect men's sexual behavior: rural or urban residence (because social control mechanisms are presumably weaker in urban regions), travel away from home in the past 12 months, and social position in the household, determined by whether the man lived alone, headed a two-person household, headed a larger household, was the son or grandson of the head of the household, or was in another position. Logistic regression was used to elucidate any relationships among men's characteristics, social control variables and having had multiple partnerships.