Weaving Networks of Responsibility: Community Work in Development Programs in Rural Malawi

Abstract

The need to cope with the impact of the AIDS epidemic on communities in Africa has resulted in the emergence of numerous community health and development programs. Initiated by governments, international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and local organizations, such programs target local communities with the goal of building care and support mechanisms in the local level. Based on ethnographic field research in rural Malawi, and drawing from the cross-disciplinary debate on development work, the article explores the work of an NGO offering health and care programs to orphans and vulnerable children. Through analyzing the organization's scope of work, the article demonstrates how the NGO acts to structure local social networks as instruments of care and offers a new reading of the role of NGOs in which the limitations of development work and the work of NGOs are understood within their local context and not only in the context of broad cultural critique.

Keywords:

• community
• development
• HIV/AIDS
• Malawi
• NGOs
• orphans and vulnerable children

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

An earlier version of this article was presented at the Society for Applied Anthropology/Society for Medical Anthropology Annual Meetings 2008 (Memphis TN). I would like to thank the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, the Fulbright Foundation and the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, the Shaine Center for Social Research and the Einstein-Kaye fund at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the Population Study Center at the University of Pennsylvania for their financial support. I also thank Eyal Ben Ari, Alexander Weinreb, Paul Farmer, Peter Brown, Ann Swidler, Nir Gazit, Sarah Willen, Heide Castañeda, Yael Maoz-Shai, Mark Schuller, Yael Abessira, Anastasia Hudgins, Andria Timmer, and the editor and anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier drafts.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anat Rosenthal

ANAT ROSENTHAL, PhD, is a Lady Davis Fellow at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel. Her current research focuses on the impact of AIDS on kinship systems and social institutions and on health care delivery in resource-limited settings.