Abstract
As the specter of HIV looms in the background, Botswana’s industry of orphan-focused aid interventions reflects deep-seated anxieties about girls’ bodies, health, sexuality, and morality. As foreign NGO staff lament “patriarchal” norms that supposedly leave orphaned girls culturally and economically ill-equipped to refuse advances from older men, these organizations seek new ways to liberate orphans from underage sexual relationships. I trace how one NGO attempted to render sugar daddies unnecessary by directly giving girls the gifts a boyfriend would provide, drawing on human rights and empowerment discourses. However, many orphans began to appropriate these NGO resources in order to attract even wealthier boyfriends, aggressively pursuing age-unequal relationships using the very tools the NGO provided to fight them. While tales of failed intervention are commonly represented in development studies as evidence of either “culture clash” between foreign aid and local customs, or as the “unintended consequences” of aid, this article argues that such explanations fail to address the competing and coalescing moralities that motivated the girls’ behavior. By recognizing their actions as efforts to manipulate multiple moral codes that are at play during the HIV epidemic, I suggest that we may reach a better grasp of the inner lives of aid’s targets and gain fresh perspectives on the intimate sociopolitical effects of intervention.
Published Version
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