Relationships on the Ground: How Community Health Workers Navigate “Community” in Malawi

EVENT DETAILS
event

Date: Friday, September 20th, 2024
Time: 12:15 PM - 1:30 PM

location_on

Liu Institute for Global Issues
6476 NW Marine Dr, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z2, Canada

About

Community health workers (CHWs) in Malawi use their positionality—as cultural brokers between communities, NGOs, and the state—to form relationships that make global health work. In mediating program and community goals, CHWs are critical lynchpins in the everyday, unseen work behind global health programs. Without this labor, global community health projects would inevitably fail, as the brokerage role that CHWs undertake is critical to ensure that project goals are effectively translated to communities for uptake.

Fischer uses ethnographic observation and interviews to demonstrate how this work of building relationships, both with community members and with NGO or state-based actors, is an essential but undervalued expertise. This argument pushes the boundaries of how we understand, define, and evaluate “success” in global health programs, while shedding light on the significance of individual and community connections for the achievement of population health.

Hosted by Dr. Veena Sriram, Assistant Professor at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs and the School of Population and Public Health, in collaboration with the Office of Regional and International Community Engagement.

About the Speaker

Professor Sara E. Fischer

Sara E. Fischer, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Master of Public Health program at the University of Puget Sound. Her research focuses on global health politics, particularly around community health systems and relationships in global health, with her work focusing mainly on Malawi. Formally trained as a political scientist with a background in public health, her scholarship lies at the nexus of global health systems, the politics of health policy and global governance, international development, and the power dynamics of foreign aid relationships.