Global health enabling systems

Crane, Johanna

doi:10.17157/mat.5.2.535

Cited by 4 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…In this way, ‘partnership’ is central to the way in which global health science is imagined, or dreamed, by its leading practitioners. Many African researchers share this vision of good partnerships as rooted if not necessarily in resource equity, then in an equity of ideas and scientific contribution (Parker and Kingori 2016; Okwaro and Geissler 2015; Okeke 2018; Boum 2018). This dream of partnership distinguishes global health from its paternalistic antecedents and stakes an ethical claim – two interrelated goals.…”

Section: Dreams and Realities In Global Healthmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, they do so by allocating legal power and capacity to non-profit corporations that act primarily on behalf of the US partner institution, while simultaneously shielding them from liability. Might these administrative enabling systems be facilitating arrangements that are harmful to African institution building, even as they make the logistics of partnership easier (Okeke 2018)? In this way, such systems may reflect an alternative definition common in certain subfields of psychology, where ‘enabling’ refers to the facilitation of self-destructive behaviour by another 15…”

Section: Enabling Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Dreaming partnership, enabling inequality: administrative infrastructure in global health science

Crane¹

2020

Africa

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This article examines the fiscal and administrative infrastructures underpinning global health research partnerships between the US and Uganda, and the power dynamics they entail. Science studies scholars and anthropologists have argued for the importance of studying so-called ‘boring things’ – standards, bureaucracies, routinization, codes and databases, for example – as a way to bring to the surface the assumptions and power relations that often lie embedded within them. This article focuses on fiscal administration as an understudied ethnographic object within the anthropology of global health. The first part of the article is a case study of the fiscal administration of a US–Uganda research partnership. The second part describes the institutionalization of some of the administrative norms and practices used by this partnership within the ‘global health enabling systems’ employed by US universities working in Uganda and elsewhere in Africa. I analyse a case study and ‘enabling systems’ to show how these administrative strategies create parallel infrastructures that avoid direct partnership with Ugandan public institutions and may facilitate the outsourcing of legal and financial risks inherent in international partnerships to Ugandan collaborators. In this way, these strategies act to disable rather than enable (or build) Ugandan research and institutional capacity, and have profound implications for African institutions as well as for the dream of ‘real partnership’ in global health.

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Section: Dreams and Realities In Global Healthmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Enabling Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dreaming partnership, enabling inequality: administrative infrastructure in global health science

Crane¹

2020

Africa

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“…Calls to increase trust and transparency, and the tools employed in their names, operate in the African context as what Jemima Pierre (2020) terms racial vernac ulars. Suspicions of corruption, for instance, are figured through longstanding tropes of Africans and Africa rooted in lack, indiscipline, duplicity, backwardness, or incompetence (Crane 2018;Muir and Gupta 2018: S6;Smith 2007). Suspicion and mistrust infuse infrastructures and technologies that aim to capture illicit be haviours or people, whether sugar cane thieves or potentially corrupt NGO staff or beneficiaries of donor projects.…”

Section: Racialised Suspicionmentioning

confidence: 99%

When partners are suspect(s)

Biruk

2023

The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology

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This article considers how concerns about trust in global health infrastructures—and the surveillance tools they justify—emerge from suspicions anchored in imaginaries of ‘Africa’ and ‘Africans’. Amid anxieties about corruption in global health circles, I consider how debates about providing per diems to African participants in international projects are articulated in racial terms. Drawing on examples from Malawi, I analyse the top-down push to make such disbursements more transparent via mobile money. Troubling celebratory framings of this technology, I demonstrate how a tool meant to increase transparency instead gives rise to mistrust and strained relations by casting African partners as suspects. While much of the scholarship on trust probes its interpersonal dimensions, this article addresses how bureaucratic infrastructures are constituted by assumptions about whom or what can be trusted. The impersonal and technical characteristics of transparency tools common to global health obscures their underpinning colonial and racial logics.

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Descriptive analysis of men’s sexual behaviour in sub-Saharan Africa: Simplicity-parsimony approach

Amoo

Solanke

Amoo³

et al. 2020

Cogent Arts & Humanities

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The interconnection between men's sexual behaviour as a contributor to burden of reproductive and sexual health diseases in sub-Saharan Africa are often presented with complex and sophisticated statistical analyses with little or no comprehension among the affected population that are mostly with little or no statistical literacy and education. The study adopted simplicity-parsimony idea as amalgam of simplicity and parsimony theories in analysing the trends and patterns of men's sexual behaviour in Ethiopia, Nigeria and Zambia, the three countries selected from Eastern, Western and Southern parts of sub-Saharan Africa. Demographic Health Survey male-recode datasets (2000)(2001)(2002)(2003)(2004)(2005)(2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)(2010)(2011)(2012)(2013)(2014) were used. Simple descriptive statistical techniques at univariate and bivariate levels were conducted. The results highlighted that men's sexual behaviour are not the same in these regions. The men median sexual debut is 18 (Nigeria and Ethiopia) but 16 in Zambia. The median age at first cohabitation differs: 22 in Zambia and Ethiopia but higher in Nigeria.

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Global health enabling systems

Cited by 4 publications

References 25 publications

Dreaming partnership, enabling inequality: administrative infrastructure in global health science

Dreaming partnership, enabling inequality: administrative infrastructure in global health science

When partners are suspect(s)

Descriptive analysis of men’s sexual behaviour in sub-Saharan Africa: Simplicity-parsimony approach

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