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.
