“…To date, only a handful of scholars have explicitly correlated the water crisis in rural sub-Saharan Africa to incidences of HIV/AIDS among rural women. 22 The potential for misinterpretation of the causal link is, perhaps, high, especially given the abundant misinformation about HIV/AIDS's modes of transmission (Johnson et al 1994). In addition, controlling for "considerable variation on the ground, in households, and in communities across space and over time" (Murphy et al 2005, 265) has presented challenges even to the most rigorously conducted field studies of exogenous factors that have been extensively examined in relation to the disease, such as income, education, food production, nutrition, housing, and labor (Benki et al 2005;Clover 2003;De Vogli 2005;De Waal and Tumushabe 2003;Mtika 2001).…”