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Principal Investigators

Imarisha: Strengthening PHC by addressing gendered workplace violence

This consortium aims to fill an urgent and widespread gap in understanding and addressing workplace violence and its gendered dimensions experienced by the PHC workforce in three countries— Burkina Faso, South Africa and Tanzania—where high proportions of women work as PHC health workers and have reported high levels of violence. Imarisha is a Swahili word meaning ‘to strengthen’

Project Period

01 March 2025 – 28 Feb 2030

Background:
  • Primary health workers are the backbone of a strong health system, without whose effort and dedication, the Universal Health Coverage (UHC) agenda cannot be met. Despite their significance to achieving UHC, health workers are underpaid and unsupported by workplace regulations and policies.
  • Female health workers, who constitute the majority of the primary health workforce worldwide, face greater disadvantage due to societal gender restrictive norms and inequalities that replicate inside health systems, including their experience of workplace violence.
  • Workplace violence is pervasive compromising safety, performance and ultimately well-being. While violence affects both male and female health workers, the prevalence and consequences are worse for women. Yet there is insufficient data on the gendered dimensions of workplace violence and the needs of health workers and a paucity of policies in the health sector on workplace violence protection
Aims & Objectives:

The objectives are to undertake policy-relevant research to document the nature of PHC workplace violence and its gendered dimensions, and address the conceptual and intervention gaps in the three countries. Our research objectives are exploratory and action oriented, designed to interlink for impact. They are

  1. To map public health sector human resource policies and assess how they recognize and respond to workplace violence and its gendered dimensions in Burkina Faso, Tanzania and South Africa.
  2. To document the nature of PHC workplace violence and its gendered dimensions in Burkina Faso, Tanzania and South Africa from the perspective of health workers, managers and community members.
  3. To co-design and implement context specific system responses to address PHC workplace violence and its gendered dimensions in Burkina Faso, Tanzania and South Africa.
  4. To assess and reflect on the experiences of these system responses with stakeholders to sustain changes in policies for workplace violence and its gender dimensions in Burkina Faso, Tanzania and South Africa and beyond.
Methods:

Using desk reviews of policies, qualitative research that explores the lived experiences of health workers enduring violence, surveys to document the extent of violence, and participatory action research methods to ally with health workers, managers and communities to co-produce and co-design actionable health system changes, we aim to support adaptive learning to strengthen PHC.

Our thesis is that building a learning consortium to study gendered dimensions of workplace violence infused with decolonial and feminist approaches (i.e, anchor research in communities, encourage diverse disciplines and points of views, and focus on solutions) will help identify context relevant health system actions that can be implemented as adaptive learning and sustained beyond the life of the project.

Partners and Collaborators