When malaria rages, the women whose labour, visible and invisible, is the bedrock of the care economy, suffer; the effects reverberate across society, writes Michael Adekunle Charles
Walk into any community health centre and look at who is at the bedside of the patients. Women. Young girls who should be in school instead of tending to the sick. Young women who should be at work trying to eke a living in a world where they already get less pay than their male counterparts – and being absent means that their performance is questioned and chances of earning further diminished.
Women farmers who will miss the planting season and their families will go hungry because they had to be in hospital looking after a sick relative. As you walk further into the ward, you will see the old women – weary from a lifetime of unpaid care work. Yet having no choice but to take care of the sick because that is the way it has been for them, their mothers, and their mother’s mothers.
If the health centre you walked into is on the African continent, chances are that at least some of the patients are suffering from malaria – one of the oldest diseases that continues to plague the continent.
Every year, malaria causes an estimated 600,000 deaths; 95 percent of these are still in Africa. As are 94 percent of the 233 million cases occurring worldwide every year.
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When malaria rages, the women whose paid and unpaid labour contributes significantly to the economy, suffer – and the effects are felt by each one of us. As health systems are over-burdened by a disease that – if we use the right suite of gender-sensitive tools – we can eliminate, food systems are failing because the women on whom these systems depend are overwhelmed and not adequately supported.
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Women are the backbone of the care economy. They not only make up 65 percent of the global health and care workforce but also perform more than 75 percent of unpaid care activities. Conversations on gender and health continue but what we need the most is action.
There is an inherent injustice in the fact that we are not investing enough resources to eliminate a disease that affects a group of people who already live in a society whose socio-cultural norms leave them disadvantaged.
Or is it precisely because of these socio-cultural norms that we cannot see the damage that this disease is causing and act fast?
Are we so used to seeing women lose time by the bedsides of the sick that a few more hours lost over their lifetime ceases to give us sleepless nights?
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And even though reality tells me that we have only invested $3.5 billion – less than half of the $7.3 billion that we need in order to eliminate malaria by 2030 – the tenacity of the people, especially women, gives me hope. The dedication of the women in our homes who keep the environment clean to keep dangerous vectors that cause malaria and other diseases away. The love of the women who tuck their children under treated mosquito bed nets every day. The female health workers who have dedicated their lives to fighting the disease, sometimes in the most complex of circumstances.
Why, then, do we take this tenacity for granted? Our investments in malaria must address the way in which women are disproportionately affected not just because of biological factors such as childbirth and pregnancy that leaves them more susceptible but also social factors.
It is already an indictment on us all that the same women who shoulder the care load when it comes to malaria are also more likely to die when they get the disease – especially if they are pregnant.
While malaria is responsible for 10,000 maternal deaths each year, only about 40 percent of women receive the treatment that they need for malaria during pregnancy.
Yes, the same women who look after the sick are not looked after. Even where treatment for malaria is available, women may not have the economic means to access it as they already form the majority of the population living in poverty. In some cases, they have to get permission from their partners before going to the health centres to seek treatment. And this delays interventions.
Gender is high on the agenda of the RBM Partnership to End Malaria. Every single one of our partners’ interventions, right from who receives mosquito bed nets for the family, who we are enabling to participate in policy conversations, our evidence and documentation to our support to governments in designing and implementing gender-sensitive approaches, is underpinned by gender considerations.
But social norms permeate society in deep and complex ways, and this cannot be a fight for RBM or the malaria community alone.
Seeing malaria through a women’s rights prism means we realise that we must all respect, protect and fulfil women’s rights to health – and that this is not just a call for us to benevolently support women but rather a demand that we meet our duty to address inequality and invest more in the multiple sectors that would contribute to freeing women from the burden of malaria. –AFRICAN ARGUMENT
