 To better understand the context of HIV in Malawi, and to determine potential responses, it is important to consider HIV within an ecosocial framework. Moving beyond the conventional focus on proximal factors contributing to HIV vulnerability, like individual risk behaviors, it is essential that interventions address poverty and food insecurity as interrelated distal factors in the HIV pandemic, especially in countries like Malawi. Poverty has been consistently recognized as a risk factor for food insecurity and HIV, and food insecurity a risk factor for poor HIV-related outcomes. 