Search
Search within West Africa, Resources,
130 results found
Research paper
Reaching the end goal: Do interventions to improve climate information services lead to greater food security?
Through household surveys, focus group activities, and participant observation, this research investigates linkages between CIS, uptake of CSA practices, and household food security through investigation of four research sites, two in Senegal and two in Kenya. Through household surveys, focus…
Research paper
Unintended consequences of the ‘bushmeat ban’ in West Africa during the 2013-2016 Ebola virus disease epidemic.
Following the 2013-2016 outbreak of Ebola virus disease (EVD) in West Africa, governments across the region imposed a ban on the hunting and consumption of meat from wild animals. This injunction was accompanied by public health messages emphasising the infectious…
Research paper
“We are the heroes because we are ready to die for this country”: Participants’ decision-making and grounded ethics in an Ebola vaccine clinical trial
This paper reports findings from social science research carried out in Kambia, Northern Sierra Leone during first year of an Ebola vaccine trial (August 2015–July 2016). The study used a range of qualitative methods to explore participant motivations for volunteering…
Background report
Women,Peace and Casamance – A field study of how women organisations in Casamance, Senegal are working for peace
Drawing on feminist critical theory, this ethnographic study in Casamance examined how gender roles affect women and women organisations strive for peace. The research shows how embedded gender roles in the Senegalese society and the patriarchal system dominate, making it…
Accepted monitoring or endured quarantine? Ebola contacts’ perceptions in Senegal
During the 2014-2016 West Africa Ebola epidemic, transmission chains were controlled through contact tracing, i.e., identification and follow-up of people exposed to Ebola cases. WHO recommendations for daily check-ups of physical symptoms with social distancing for 21 days were unevenly…
Engaging ‘communities’: anthropological insights from the West African Ebola epidemic
This article reflects on the nature of community engagement during the Ebola epidemic and demonstrates a disjuncture between local realities and what is being imagined in post-Ebola reports about the lessons that need to be learned for the future.
How do places of origin influence access to mobility in the global age? An analysis of the influence of vulnerability and structural constraints on Senegalese translocal livelihood strategies
This paper investigates how place-related vulnerability and structural constraints influence the way Senegalese households construct translocal spaces and livelihood strategies in the global age.
Local disease-ecosystem-livelihood dynamics: reflections from comparative case studies in Africa
This article explores the implications for human health of local interactions between disease, ecosystems and livelihoods. Five interdisciplinary case studies addressed zoonotic diseases in African settings: Rift Valley fever (RVF) in Kenya, human African trypanosomiasis in Zambia and Zimbabwe, Lassa…
Research paper
Structural drivers of vulnerability to zoonotic disease in Africa
This paper analyses three case studies—trypanosomiasis in Zimbabwe, Ebola and Lassa fever in Sierra Leone and Rift Valley fever in Kenya — to argue that addressing the underlying structural drivers of disease vulnerability is essential for a ‘One Health’ approach…
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
The politics of risk policies in Dakar, Senegal
The paper presents research on the flood mitigation strategies of urban dwellers and the State in the same locality in the suburbs of Dakar. Through an Actor Network Theory approach based on a “translocal” ethnography of risk, the paper explores…
Research paper
The symbolic violence of ‘outbreak’: A mixed methods, quasi-experimental impact evaluation of social protection on Ebola survivor wellbeing
Despite over 28,000 reported cases of Ebola virus disease (EVD) in the 2013-16 outbreak in West Africa, we are only beginning to trace the complex biosocial processes that have promoted its spread. Important questions remain, including the effects on survivors…
Adding Scepticism About ‘Environmentality’: Gender Exclusion Through a Natural Resources Collectivization Initiative in Dionewar, Senegal
Research on the commons has demonstrated the capacity of local people to define efficient common resource management institutions and organizations that enforce them. However, little is still known about the motivations of the actors that craft bottom-up institutions. Environmentality proponents…
Behavioural and emotional responses to the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Nigeria: a narrative review
This paper reviews the behavioural and emotional responses to the 2014 Ebola virus disease (EVD) outbreak in Nigeria as documented in scientific publications and portrayed in the media between 21 July 2014 and 30 March 2015.
Research paper
Revisiting Tropes of Environmental and Social Change in Casamance, Senegal
The chapter examines paddy rice cultivation in Casamance, southern Senegal, amid broader contemporary contestations about environmentally induced migration.
Research paper
Understanding Women’s Needs for Weather and Climate Information in Agrarian Settings: The Case of Ngetou Maleck, Senegal
This paper demonstrates that even at the village level, women have different climate and weather information needs, and differing abilities to act on that information. Preconceived connections between identities and vulnerability hinder the ability to address the climate-related development and…
Research paper
Without Rain or Land, Where Will Our People Go? Climate Change, Land Grabbing, and Human Mobility: Insights from Senegal and Cambodia
Based on a multi-case and multi-sited qualitative study in both Senegal and Cambodia, involving more than 150 participants in semi-structured interviews and focus groups affected by four different agribusiness projects, this paper shows how these three major contemporary challenges are…
“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…
Ebola-Myths, Realities, and Structural Violence
This briefing examines responses to the Ebola outbreak and offers a different set of explanations, rooted in the history of the region and the political economy of global health and development.
Climate and Mobility in the West African Sahel: Conceptualising the Local Dimensions of the Environment and Migration Nexus
Despite the theoretical and methodological critique of deterministic and linear explanations of migration under changing climatic conditions, many empirical case studies in this field remain deeply entrenched in static push-pull frameworks and tend to reproduce simplistic causal relationships. Drawing on…
Errance and Elsewheres among Africans Waiting to Restart Their Journeys in Dakar, Senegal
This article analyzes the experience of Africans stranded in Dakar, Senegal, halfway through their intended journeys out of the continent.
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…
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.
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.
Political Economy Analysis of Forced Displacement in Casamance, Senegal
This report describes research on dynamics of displacement due to armed conflict in Casamance, Senegal. It finds that historical policies, inequality, marginalisation, weak governance and entrenched poverty have conspired to foster continued impoverishment and arrested development in displacement affected communities,…
Conserving Nature, Transforming Authority: Eviction and Development at the Margins of the State The Niokolo-Koba National Park, Senegal
This dissertation examines two distinct but interrelated processes of displacement experienced by the evictees of the Niokolo-Koba National Park, based on fieldwork (2004-2005) in the Tambacounda region of South-Eastern Senegal.
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…
‘Mobile transmigrants’ or ‘unsettled returnees’? myth of return and permanent resettlement among Senegalese migrants
Based on ethnographic research conducted among Senegalese migrants in the home country and in Italy, this paper demonstrates the existence, the logics, and functioning of a transmigrant movement made of people who are regular ‘comers and goers’ between Africa and…
Research paper
Rural-to-urban migration, kinship networks, and fertility among the Igbo in Nigeria
This paper presents ethnographic data to suggest that fertility behavior in contemporary Igbo-speaking Nigeria cannot be understood without taking into account the ways in which rural and urban social and demographic regimes are mutually implicated and dialectically constituted.
Corruption, NGOs, and development in Nigeria
This article examines corruption in Nigeria’s development sector, particularly in the vastly growing arena of local non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Grounded in ethnographic case studies, the analysis explores why local NGOs in Nigeria have proliferated so widely, what they do in…
Courting success in HIV/AIDS prevention: the challenges of addressing a concentrated epidemic in Senegal
This article presents findings from a study of HIV/AIDS programmes for urban sex workers in Dakar, Senegal. The objective of the research was to assess HIV prevention and treatment efforts to date, and to identify challenges that must be overcome…
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).
Flexibility in return, reconstruction and livelihoods in displaced villages in Casamance, Senegal
The paper argues that livelihoods research in situations of violent conflict and its aftermath can contribute to geographical understandings of flexibility. Such settings paradoxically demand greater flexibility from economic actors while imposing new and sometimes severe constraints on them to…
Research paper
The anti-politics of health reform: household power relations and child health in rural Senegal
This article employs ethnographic evidence from rural Senegal to explore two dimensions of health sector reform. First, it makes the case that health reforms intersect with and exacerbate existing social, political, and economic inequalities. Second, the article explores how liberal…
Exploring the cultural context of HIV/AIDS pandemic in a Nigerian community: Implication for culture specific prevention programmes
The new face of Human Immune Virus (HIV)/ Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) has earned its recognition as a social problem due to the associated devastating social and cultural consequences on the individual and the society at large. As such,…
