The Afterlife of Aid: An Ethnographic Study in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa

Abstract

Global health community-based interventions are habitually time-limited. Given their temporal nature, it is imperative to understand how these interventions impact, affect and shape people’s lives once these programs come to an end. Drawing on three months of ethnographic fieldwork in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa after one global health intervention had ended, I argue that transient global health programs have lasting—often destabilizing—residual effects, especially impacting community social relations after they end. Specifically, by using anthropology’s field methods, I illuminate feelings of abandonment that resulted because of broad inclusion criteria of past programs and subsequently how the contraction of these programs has had fracturing effects on the status of community workers and on the patron-client bonds between community workers and their clients. Although global health organizations continue to advocate for community-based care, the nature of their short-lived interventions are weakening the social relations they rely on in the afterlife of aid.