ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the gendered political economy of the Polio Eradication Initiative (PEI) in Afghanistan. It draws from field research conducted with male and female Community Health Workers (CHWs) in Afghanistan, who, working as unpaid volunteers, form the foundation of the Community Based Health Care (CBHC) pillar of the Ministry of Public Health (MoPH). It also reflects on interviews with temporarily employed frontline workers in the PEI. The chapter explores how the neoliberal ‘reconstruction’ policies imposed on Afghanistan by donors including the United States military occupiers – now-turned economic advisers – are premised on a highly gendered exploitation of labour, and misuse narratives of women’s empowerment even as they seamlessly intertwine with the country’s own patriarchal patronage systems. It finds that women, who have the highest chance of being able to enter households to find every child and support caregivers in making the choice to vaccinate all their children, neither gain from the financial opportunities working in the PEI brings, nor contribute in any systematic way to achieving its goals. As such, the PEI is exemplary of the ‘slow violence’ of neoliberal ‘post-war’ reconstruction efforts, which, rhetoric aside, do very little to enhance women’s ability to assess the circumstances in which they are living, extend their level of control and other influence over decision-making spaces and approaches, or improve their lives.
