The Lives of Community Health Workers

The importance of community health workers is increasingly recognized within many of today's most high-profile global health interventions, including campaigns focused on specific diseases and broader efforts to strengthen health systems and achieve universal health care. Based on ethnographic work [...]
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The importance of community health workers is increasingly recognized within many of today's most high-profile global health interventions, including campaigns focused on specific diseases and broader efforts to strengthen health systems and achieve universal health care. Based on ethnographic work with a group of Ethiopian women and men who provide home-based care in Addis Ababa during the early roll-out of antiretroviral therapies, this book illustrates what it actually means to become a community health worker in today's global health industry. Drawing on the author's interviews with community health workers, this volume considers what motives them to improve the quality of life and death of the most marginalized people in their own communities. The Lives of Community Health Workers also illuminates the intricate links between their contributions at a micro level and policymaking and practice at higher levels in the field of global health, and demonstrates that a more intimate understanding of the former can improve our understanding of the latter, and vice versa.It shows us that many of the challenges that community health workers face in their daily lives are embedded in much bigger social, economic, and political contexts, and it raises a resounding call for further research into their labour, and the health and social systems they inhabit.