How community physical, structural, and social stressors relate to mental health in the urban slums of Accra, Ghana.

Urban health in developing counties is a major public health challenge. It has become increasingly evident that the dialog must expand to include mental health outcomes, and to shift focus to the facets of the urban environment that shape them. Population-based research is necessary, as empirical findings linking the urban environment and mental health have primarily derived from developed countries, and may not be generalizable to developing countries.

Housing, medical, and food deprivation in poor urban contexts: implications for multiple sexual partnerships and transactional sex in Nairobi's slums.

Identifying the factors that lead to sexual risk behavior is crucial in addressing the HIV epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa. Scholars have primarily relied on traditional measures of SES (income, wealth, and education) to predict risk, overlooking measures of deprivation in important social arenas such as housing, medical care, and food expenses. Findings demonstrated that all three deprivation measures, particularly housing and health care, were robust influences of sexual risk even while controlling for traditional SES measures.

Urbanisation, poverty and sexual behaviour: the tale of five African cities.

The question of how urbanisation and poverty are linked in sub-Saharan Africa is an increasingly pressing one. The urban character of the HIV epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa exacerbates concern about the urbanisation - poverty relationship. Recent empirical work has linked urban poverty, and particularly slum residence, to risky sexual behaviour in Kenya's capital city, Nairobi.

Internal migration to Nairobi's slums: linking migrant streams to sexual risk behavior.

Despite what is currently the most rapid urbanization on the globe, an alarming growth of impoverished urban slum settlements in Africa, and the highest rates of HIV in the world - with greater prevalence in urban than rural areas - insufficient attention has been paid to the relationship between urban poverty and risky sexual behavior. Although emerging research has focused on how slum residence is linked to risky behavior, there is a paucity of work on how migration to slums is related to risky sex. Using a sample of sexually active women from the 2000 Nairobi Cross-Sectional Slum Survey (NCSS), this paper demonstrates that the relationship between slum residence and risky behavior is a multifaceted one.

Homelessness and hunger.

We employ data from the National Survey of Homeless Assistance Providers and Clients to examine the character and correlates of hunger among homeless people. Our analysis, couched in an adaptation framework, finds more support for the differentiation hypothesis than for the leveling hypothesis: Complex patterns of food insecurity exist at the individual level, and they vary with the resources available (e.g.