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Search within West Africa, Health, wellbeing and care,
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Case study
SSHAP learning note: Building a localised approach
This learning note shares insights, experiences and lessons from SSHAP's approach to the localisation of its operational responses in sub-Saharan Africa.
Research paper
Diagnosis, treatment, and management of mpox in urban informal settlements in southwestern Nigeria: an ethnographic approach
This paper, based on an ethnographic study in southwestern Nigeria, seeks to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of not only the health care access barriers, but the complex geographical, economic, and sociocultural factors that shape how and when people…
Research paper
Mpox and the men who have sex with men (MSM) community in Nigeria: Exploratory insights from MSM and persons providing healthcare services to them
This paper explores mpox awareness, knowledge, and experiences among men who have sex with men (MSM) in Lagos, Nigeria, to provides insights to improve Nigeria's mpox response and inform similar public health efforts in Africa where MSM criminalisation complicates MSM…
Briefing
Post-trauma impacts in conflict-affected communities in northern Nigeria
This Key Considerations brief compares the biomedical framing of post-traumatic stress disorder with the social science understanding of the drivers of and possible solutions for mental health impacts of trauma.
Briefing
Addressing the kush epidemic in Sierra Leone
This Key Considerations brief contextualises and provides insight into an epidemic which is symptomatic of deeper, long-standing issues which require sustained and comprehensive solutions beyond immediate emergency measures.
Briefing
Addressing the humanitarian needs of forced rural-to-city migrants in north-west Nigeria with a focus on mental health vulnerability
This Fellows Brief calls for action to address the needs of a hitherto underserved, internally displaced people.
Briefing
SSHAP West Africa Hub: Health emergency cycles and social context in West Africa fr
This landscape paper summarises the contextual factors that shape health emergencies and responses to health emergencies in the West Africa region, drawing on examples from Nigeria, Senegal and Sierra Leone.
Non-use of modern contraceptives among women in humanitarian contexts: evidence from a qualitative study in Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria.
The continuing conflict situation in Nigeria have created over 2 million displaced persons. In 2019, women and children accounted for about 80% of the internally displaced population in the country. Displacement increases the need for reproductive health services. This study…
Patronage, partnership, voluntarism: Community-based health insurance and the improvisation of universal health coverage in Senegal
The turn towards Universal Health Coverage (UHC) in the past decade raises the question of the role of the state, following years of state withdrawal and a fragmented approach to public health. Senegal introduced its version of UHC, Couverture Maladie…
Research paper
Subversive Epidemiology in Abortion Care: Reproductive Governance from the Global to the Local in Argentina and Senegal
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Argentina and Senegal, this paper explores how health workers have adapted the global postabortion care model in ways that simultaneously challenge and reinforce national prohibitions on abortion. Although the global postabortion care model aimed to…
Research paper
Treatment success or failure in children and adolescents born with HIV in rural Senegal: An anthropological perspective
The article presents the results of an anthropological study that aims to examine the modalities of medical and social care for CALHIV, identify the various structural and social determinants of treatment failure or success, and ascertain their respective influence. The…
Research paper
‘With the kanyaleng and the help of god, you don’t feel ashamed’: women experiencing infertility in Casamance, Senegal
While the precarious situation of women with infertility in Sub-Saharan Africa is well documented, little is known about the ways in which such women show agency despite the challenges that infertility brings to their lives. This study provided a holistic…
Interembodiment, Inheritance, and Intergenerational Health
This article introduces the concept of interembodiment, animated bodily entanglements between people, to illustrate the shared sense of illness that transgresses discrete biological bodies.
Doing gender, doing alcohol: The paradox of gendered drinking practices among young Nigerians.
In traditional Nigeria, consumption norms prohibited women’s and young people’s alcohol use. Nowadays, young men and women use alcohol, and many enact identities with heavy drinking. This study uses gender performance theory and interviews/focus group data from 72 young Nigerian…
Research paper
Responsibility, repair and care in Sierra Leone’s health system.
Central to the workings of a hospital are the technical and bureaucratic systems that ensure the effective coordination of information and biological materials of patients across time and space. In this paper, which is based on ethnographic research in a…
Caregivers’ perception of risk for malaria, helminth infection and malaria-helminth co-infection among children living in urban and rural settings of Senegal: A qualitative study.
The parasites causing malaria, soil-transmitted helminthiasis and schistosomiasis frequently co-exist in children living in low-and middle-income countries, where existing vertical control programmes for the control of these diseases are not operating at optimal levels. This gap necessitates the development and…
Research paper
Progress in the face of cuts: a qualitative Nigerian case study of maintaining progress towards universal health coverage after losing donor assistance
In the coming years, about a dozen middle-income countries are excepted to transition out of development assistance for health (DAH) based on their economic growth. This anticipated loss of external funds at a time when there is a need for…
Diagnosing Diabetes, Diagnosing Colonialism: An Ethnography of the Classification and Counting of a Senegalese Metabolic Disease
This article explores the top-down production of the statistics frequently circulated in global health. These data must first originate in a place like the public hospital in Saint-Louis, Senegal, in doctor’s offices and laboratories and medical archives.
Research paper
What post-abortion care indicators don’t measure: Global abortion politics and obstetric practice in Senegal
This article draws on an ethnography of Senegal’s post-abortion care (PAC) program, conducted between 2010 and 2011, to illustrate how PAC indicators obscure the professional and technological complexities of treating abortion complications in contexts where abortion is illegal. The author…
Research paper
“You have to find a caring man, like your father!” Gendering sickle cell and refashioning women’s moral boundaries in Sierra Leone
This qualitative study undertaken in 2018, explores if and how sickle cell disorders become gendered in Sierra Leone through the analytical framework of a feminist ethics of care.
Men’s experiences of pregnancy and childbirth in Sierra Leone: Reexamining definitions of “male partner involvement”.
In recent decades, global health researchers and policy makers have advocated for men’s increased involvement in pregnancy and childbirth with the goal of improving maternal health outcomes. However, such approaches often fail to account for the culturally valid and gendered…
Caregiving in Crisis: Fatherhood Refashioned by Sierra Leone’s Ebola Epidemic
In much of the literature on Sierra Leone, young men have been recognized for perpetrating violence or resisting authority. This characterization extended into the Ebola crisis, as young men were depicted as “resisting” public health measures. In contrast, little scholarship…
Community health care workers in pursuit of TB: Discourses and dilemmas
Community-led tuberculosis (TB) active case finding is widely promoted, heavily funded, but many efforts fail to meet expectations. The underlying reasons why TB symptom screening programs underperform are poorly understood. This study examines Nigerian stakeholders’ insights to characterize the mechanisms,…
Background report
Your Pocket Is What Cures You: The Politics of Health in Senegal
In the wake of structural adjustment programs in the 1980s and health reforms in the 1990s, the majority of sub-Saharan African governments spend less than ten dollars per capita on health annually, and many Africans have limited access to basic…
Research paper
Why didn’t you write this in your diary? Or how nurses (mis)used clinic diaries to (re)claim shared reflexive spaces in Senegal
At the intersection between writings and silences, this paper explores the role played by the clinic diaries to mediate ethnographic encounters, and the iterative nature of ‘doing fieldwork’ to produce knowledge in hierarchical health systems. This paper also reflects on…
Research paper
Social learning, influence, and ethnomedicine: Individual, neighborhood and social network influences on attachment to an ethnomedical cultural model in rural Senegal
In this paper, the authors examine the association between individual, neighborhood, and social network characteristics and the likelihood of attachment to an ethnomedical cultural model encompassing beliefs about etiology of disease, appropriate therapeutic and preventative measures, and more general beliefs…
Envisioning, Evaluating and Co-Enacting Performance in Global Health Interventions: Ethnographic Insights from Senegal
The notion of performance has become dominant in health programming, whether being embodied through pay-for-performance schemes or through other incentive-based interventions. In this article, we seek to unpack the idea of performance and performing in a dialogical fashion between field-based…
Metrics of Survival: Post-Abortion Care and Reproductive Rights in Senegal.
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Senegal between 2010 and 2011, the author demonstrates how health professionals have deployed indicators such as number of women and abortion type treated in government hospitals to demonstrate commitment to global mandates on reproductive…
Research paper
The Islamification of antiretroviral therapy: Reconciling HIV treatment and religion in northern Nigeria.
Access and adherence to antiretroviral therapy (ART) are essential to HIV treatment success and epidemic control. This article is about how HIV-positive Muslims and providers balance ART with religious tenets and obligations.
Research paper
Right tool, wrong “job”: Manual vacuum aspiration, post-abortion care and transnational population politics in Senegal
The “rightness” of a technology for completing a particular task is negotiated by medical professionals, patients, state institutions, manufacturing companies, and non-governmental organizations. This paper shows how certain technologies may challenge the meaning of the “job” they are designed to…
“Right tool,” wrong “job”: Manual vacuum aspiration, post-abortion care and transnational population politics in Senega
The “rightness” of a technology for completing a particular task is negotiated by medical professionals, patients, state institutions, manufacturing companies, and non-governmental organizations. This paper shows how certain technologies may challenge the meaning of the “job” they are designed to…
Research paper
Rewriting abortion: deploying medical records in jurisdictional negotiation over a forbidden practice in Senegal
This study explores how medical providers deploy medical records in boundary work over the treatment of complications of spontaneous and induced abortion in Senegal, where induced abortion is prohibited under any circumstance.
HIV, embodied secrets, and intimate labour in northern Nigeria
This article explores how HIV-positive women manage secrets through the use of their bodies. Women conspicuously enhance their beauty in an attempt to defend themselves against the violence of social exclusion.
Exceptional suffering? Enumeration and vernacular accounting in the HIV-positive experience.
Drawing on 17 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Freetown, Sierra Leone, I highlight the recursive relationship between Sierra Leone as an exemplary setting and HIV as an exceptional disease. Through this relationship, I examine how HIV-positive individuals rely on both…
A History of Urban Planning and Infectious Diseases: Colonial Senegal in the Early Twentieth Century
This paper deals with the spatial implications of the French sanitary policies in early colonial urban Senegal. It focuses on the French politics of residential segregation following the outbreak of the bubonic plague in Dakar in 1914, and their precedents…
Past horrors, present struggles: the role of stigma in the association between war experiences and psychosocial adjustment among former child soldiers in Sierra Leone.
We examined the role of stigma (manifest in discrimination as well as lower levels of community and family acceptance) in the relationship between war-related experiences and psychosocial adjustment (depression, anxiety, hostility and adaptive behaviors).
