Sexy Orphans and Sugar Daddies: the Sexual and Moral Politics of Aid for AIDS in Botswana Bianca Dahl 1 # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015 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 Bpatriarchal^ 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 appro- priate 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 Bculture clash^ between foreign aid and local customs, or as the Bunintended 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. Keywords HIV/AIDS . Orphans . Sexuality . Morality . Foreign aid . Botswana On a bright sunny morning in mid-2004, Piet, a European aidworker who had founded an orphan day care NGO in southeastern Botswana, was being interviewed by a British journalist. Piet had invited me, the NGO’ s resident anthropologist, into the office to watch the interview take place. I listened from my perch on a stool in the back of the room while Piet animatedly explained why, as he put it, Bnone of our orphan girls has St Comp Int Dev DOI 10.1007/s12116-015-9195-1 * Bianca Dahl bianca.dahl@utoronto.ca 1 Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada