The plurality of men and women’s involvement in newborn health care in rural Mali

Abstract

This ethnographic work seeks to understand the construction of gender and generational social relationships around the health of the newborn in both the care setting and in the family setting. An immersion of several weeks made it possible to collect data on the most common perceptions and practices that shape the daily lives of the various actors involved in the health of the newborn. The data was collected using participant observation, semi-structured interviews. Much additional data was collected through informal interviews. In health institutions, people who play the role of caregiver are usually women. They come most often from the husband's family and are engaged in a role that can be assimilated to "care". In most cases, the involvement of husbands concerns the transport of the woman to the health center, the transport of food, the administrative procedures, the payment of prescriptions. In a family environment, caring for the newborn also follows sexual logic as well as generational logic that shows a better integration of biomedicine guidelines by young women. However, the data from the survey showed that men's involvement and women's involvement can not be defined according to a dual separation between masculine and feminine roles because social relations are constructed according to many other variables. The health of the newborn is at the center of several normative registers that try to influence it in their own way. This necessarily plural reality often escapes public health programs.