Voluntarism & State-Making
13 participants from Africa, Europe and North America came together for an interdisciplinary workshop on voluntarism and state-making in June 2024. Contributions examined the role of voluntarism within Ghana, Rwanda, Chad, Sierra Leone, Democratic Republic of Congo, Malawi, Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia and South Africa. These examined diverse spheres such as humanitarian response, paralegal services, water provision, peace-building, policing, health and public works, showing the extent to which voluntary labour powers the state, in Africa and beyond.
Dispossession and Voluntarism: The Dynamics of Community Health Workers in Kenya
Podcast on The Kenyanist
African Governments, including Kenya, are attempting to address the problem of manpower and financing by adopting the use of Community Health Workers, usually working as volunteers. Yet, this complicates things further, as health is a devolved function under the 2010 Constitution, and county governments claim they have no funding for community health. Kathy speaks to Kamau Wairuri on the history of unpaid community health labour, with particular reference to northern Kenya where such labour is borne of long-term dispossession.
New Project with University of Bayreuth
This 4-year collaboration with the University of Bayreuth examines the informal legitimation practices of non-state actors in east Africa that seek to shape public service provision. This includes Chinese companies and philanthropic actors, which seek new or varying models of social incorporation in Kenya and Tanzania and is part of worlding international relations theory beyond the West.
Community health: radical revolution or conservative coloniality?
Margaret Odera, who lives in Mathare, Kenya, is the world’s most visible Community Health Worker (CHW). She has travelled the globe, recently addressing the 76th World Health Assembly in Geneva and was named a 2022 Heroine of Health by Women in Global Health. At home, she founded a nationwide Champions Network, while juggling her CHW duties.
Margaret has gone to extraordinary lengths to become this visible. First, her journey to serving as a CHW is rooted in her own challenging experiences in accessing appropriate health services as a mother living with HIV [1]. Second, her visibility to international agencies is grounded in years of unpaid labour. Third, she took the decision to pick up her smartphone in 2020, document her challenges and share them through social media with the world [2]. This is how myself, as other scholars, and Margaret ‘connected’.
These brave actions, circumventing hierarchies, at first put her at odds with government actors, risking her status as a volunteer and more. While Margaret is now so well-known she is untouchable, the voices of hundreds of thousands of CHWs have been systematically quashed. This may be overt, on the part of local government, or a less obvious side product of external actors putting community health success first, politics second.
