Ndadwala ndi ndatopa (I am sick and I am tired) : women's caregiving and the real cost of health policy reform in Malawi

Abstract

Malawian women are struggling to cope with the assaults on their time and resources which have emerged due to high HIV infection rates, acute food shortages, endemic disease and a crumbling public health care system. Women are being asked to care for critically ill family members while still maintaining their household duties of childcare, water and fuel collection, cooking, washing, and crop production. For poor families, women's unpaid labour is the only asset which remains as the health crisis dismantles their livelihoods and they draw on it in an effort to cope. This can mean even drawing on women's principal asset: her own health. Women in Malawi are sick and tired, yet they continue to shoulder the burden of care which health policy has passed to them; formulated without acknowledging the real costs of exploiting women's labour as a substitute for genuine state-led health provision.

This thesis will show that the lived experiences of women caregivers in Malawi is inextricably linked to the policy environment governing the health sector of Malawi, and to the broader neoliberal economic project which has been directing development for the past twenty-five years. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)