K Maes
Biographic Data
| ID | 15953 |
|---|---|
| NAME | K Maes |
| GIVEN NAMES | K |
| FAMILY NAME | Maes |
| SIGNATURE | MAES K |
| AFFILIATIONS | Oregon State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6269-6419 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 35 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 217 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 35 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1985 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Actionable recommendations in response to external pressures facing anthropology departments in the U.S
As anthropology departments face pressure from state legislation, university boards, and university administrators to justify their continued existence and/or make significant – and frequently drastic – changes, department leadership and anthropology faculty are strategizing how to bolster their programs, pedagogical approaches, and industry collaborations. In this article, we compile case studies from multiple, diverse anthropology programs and …
Navigating authoritarian politics: Towards reflexive framing in healthcare research
BACKGROUND: How do Northern Global Health scholars navigate authoritarian political contexts in their research in other countries? This question motivated the research project on which this article is based. Over ten months, we conducted in-depth qualitative interviews with sixteen European and North American scholars who were engaged in health-related research in an authoritarian country we refer to as Patria. RESULTS: All our interviewees recog…
Moving away from volunteerism in community health? Motivations and wellbeing among urban and rural Ethiopian volunteers
Frequency and perceived difficulty of household water experiences in Morogoro, Tanzania: Evidence of the psychosocial burden of water insecurity
Frequency and perceived difficulty of water insecurity experiences were compared across two settings with different water landscapes. • Experiences among participants in Morogoro, Tanzania were qualitatively different than those in Amhara, Ethiopia. • Individuals who affirmed particular water-related challenges were more likely to rate them as being difficult. • Water problems associated with psycho-emotional and psychosocial stress were rated as…
Breaking the silence on gendered harassment and assault of community health workers: An analysis of ethnographic studies
INTRODUCTION: Across a variety of settings, women in tenuous financial circumstances are drawn to community health work as a way to advance themselves in the context of limited employment options. Female Community Health Workers (CHWs) are often preferred because they can more easily access mothers and children; at the same time, gender norms are at the heart of many of the challenges and inequities that these workers encounter. Here, we explore …
The Community Health Worker (CHW) Common Indicators Project: Engaging CHWs in Measurement to Sustain the Profession
Despite progress in documenting the outcomes of Community Health Worker interventions, the lack of standardized measures to assess CHW practice has made it difficult for programs to conduct reliable evaluations, and impossible to aggregate data across programs and regions, impeding commitment to sustainable, long-term financing of CHW programs. In addition, while CHWs have sometimes been involved as data collectors, they have seldom been engaged …
A Community Participatory Approach to Identify Common Evaluation Indicators for Community Health Worker Practice
Participatory identification, development, and uptake of a set of common indicators (CI) for CHW practice will allow data to be aggregated at multiple levels, potentially leading to more sustainable financing of CHW programs. Given that measurement drives practice, a set of common CHW indicators can help to preserve the flexibility and integrity of the CHW role
How Do Rural Ethiopians Rate the Severity of Water Insecurity Scale Items? Implications for Water Insecurity Measurement and Interventions
Recently developed scales aim to advance understanding of household water insecurity and inform interventions to address this critical global problem. The relative severity of items included in household water insecurity scales has been established as an inverse of the proportion of the population that reports experiencing the item. Here, we assess subjective perceptions of scale item severity among people who experience household water insecurit…
Political connections and psychosocial wellbeing among Women's Development Army leaders in rural amhara, Ethiopia: Towards a holistic understanding of community health workers' socioeconomic status
Global Health
Global health is a field of expertise that has emerged at the turn of the twenty-first century alongside changing disease profiles, health technologies, and governance structures. This entry provides an overview of the historical conditions that have given rise to the field. It illustrates the new political and financial transformations that have made global health 'global', in contrast to earlier work on international, world, or tropical health.…
Does volunteer community health work empower women? Evidence from Ethiopia’s Women’s Development Army
Of the millions of Community Health Workers (CHWs) serving their communities across the world, there are approximately twice as many female CHWs as there are male. Hiring women has in many cases become an ethical expectation, in part because working as a CHW is often seen as empowering the CHW herself to enact positive change in her community. This article draws on interviews, participant observation, document review and a survey carried out in r…
Psychosocial distress among unpaid community health workers in rural Ethiopia: Comparing leaders in Ethiopia's Women's Development Army to their peers
Human Resources for Health
The term “human resources for health” (HRH) represents a wide array of people engaged in actions intended primarily to enhance health. In the field of global health in the twenty‐first century, a primary focus is on gaps in the sufficiency and quality of doctors, nurses, midwives, and, more recently, community health workers (CHWs). Since the turn of the century, many global health experts have sought to raise awareness and understandings of geop…
Volunteers in Ethiopia’s women’s development army are more deprived and distressed than their neighbors: Cross-sectional survey data from rural Ethiopia
In rural Amhara, women who seek out and/or are sought and recruited for leader roles in the WDA are a population living in precarity. In several domains, they experience even more hardship than their neighbors. These findings highlight a need for careful attention and further research into processes of volunteer CHW selection, and to determine whether or not volunteering for CHW programs increases socioeconomic and health risks among volunteers. …
Per Diems in Polio Eradication: Perspectives From Community Health Workers and Officials
Nearly all global health initiatives give per diems to community health workers (CHWs) in poor countries for short-term work on disease-specific programs. We interviewed CHWs, supervisors, and high-level officials (n = 95) in 6 study sites across sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia in early 2012 about the per diems given to them by the Global Polio Eradication Initiative. These per diems for CHWs ranged from $1.50 to $2.40 per day. International of…
The Lives of Community Health Workers: Local Labor and Global Health in Urban Ethiopia
The importance of community health workers is increasingly recognized within many of today’s most high-profile global health programs, including campaigns focused on specific diseases and broader efforts to strengthen health systems and achieve universal health care. Based on ethnographic work with Ethiopian women and men who provided home-based care in Addis Ababa during the early roll-out of antiretroviral therapies, this book explores what it …
Experts’ tools, altruists, and job-seekers: Visions of community health workers in Ethiopia’s antiretroviral centre of excellence
This article reports on research conducted during 2007–2008 within an antiretroviral therapy (ART) programme in Addis Ababa, run as a partnership between NGOs, government health officials, and international donors. Through examination of the discourses of professionals in NGO and government sectors, and of the community health workers (CHWs) who delivered ART support and home-based care, I show how a policy of volunteerism worked on the ground, t…
A Women’s Development Army: Narratives of Community Health Worker Investment and Empowerment in Rural Ethiopia
Volunteers Are Not Paid Because They Are Priceless: Community Health Worker Capacities and Values in an Aids Treatment Intervention in Urban Ethiopia
This article analyzes community health workers' (CHW) capacities for empathic service within an AIDS treatment program in Addis Ababa. I show how CHWs' capacities to build relationships with stigmatized people, reconcile family disputes, and confront death draw on a constellation of values, desires, and emotions encouraged by CHWs' families and religious teachings. I then examine the ways in which the capacities of CHWs were valued by the institu…
Using community health workers: Discipline and Hierarchy in Ethiopia's Women's Development Army
In this article, we use semistructured interviews and documents produced by Ethiopian government officials and international health donors to examine two key features of the nation's community health worker (CHW) program: (1) the process and criteria of selecting community health workers; and (2) policies, rhetoric, and experiences of payment and empowerment. We examine these from the varied perspectives of district health officials, Health Exten…
Community health workers and social change: An introduction
Major global health institutions, public and private, currently see community health workers (CHWs) as crucial resources. But the daily experiences and complex motives of CHWs, as well as their concerns and criticisms, remain poorly understood by the institutions that promote their value and draw on their labor. Donors, states, NGOs, and other public health institutions often approach the motivations and performance of CHWs as problems that can b…
The Global Context of Vaccine Refusal: Insights from a Systematic Comparative Ethnography of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative
Many of medical anthropology's most pressing research questions require an understanding how infections, money, and ideas move around the globe. The Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) is a $9 billion project that has delivered 20 billion doses of oral polio vaccine in campaigns across the world. With its array of global activities, it cannot be comprehensively explored by the traditional anthropological method of research at one field sit…
Listening to Community Health Workers: How Ethnographic Research Can Inform Positive Relationships Among Community Health Workers, Health Institutions, and Communities
Many actors in global health are concerned with improving community health worker (CHW) policy and practice to achieve universal health care. Ethnographic research can play an important role in providing information critical to the formation of effective CHW programs, by elucidating the life histories that shape CHWs’ desires for alleviation of their own and others’ economic and health challenges, and by addressing the working relationships that …
Becoming and remaining community health workers: Perspectives from Ethiopia and Mozambique
Volunteerism or Labor Exploitation? Harnessing the Volunteer Spirit to Sustain Aids Treatment Programs in Urban Ethiopia
Based on ethnographic research in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, this paper describes NGO efforts to encourage AIDS care volunteers to eschew material returns for their labor and instead reflect on the goodness of sacrificing to promote the survival of people living with HIV/AIDS. Consensus analysis of motivational survey data collected from a sample of AIDS care volunteers (n=110) suggests that they strongly share a sacrificial and prosocial motivationa…
Water insecurity in 3 dimensions: An anthropological perspective on water and women's psychosocial distress in Ethiopia
Water insecurity is a primary underlying determinant of global health disparities. While public health research on water insecurity has focused mainly on two dimensions, water access and adequacy, an anthropological perspective highlights the cultural or lifestyle dimension of water insecurity, and its implications for access/adequacy and for the phenomenology of water insecurity. Recent work in Bolivia has shown that scores on a water insecurity…
Becoming and remaining community health workers: Perspectives from Ethiopia and Mozambique
Food insecurity and mental health: Surprising trends among community health volunteers in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia during the 2008 food crisis
Volunteers Are Not Paid Because They Are Priceless: Community Health Worker Capacities and Values in an Aids Treatment Intervention in Urban Ethiopia
This article analyzes community health workers' (CHW) capacities for empathic service within an AIDS treatment program in Addis Ababa. I show how CHWs' capacities to build relationships with stigmatized people, reconcile family disputes, and confront death draw on a constellation of values, desires, and emotions encouraged by CHWs' families and religious teachings. I then examine the ways in which the capacities of CHWs were valued by the institu…
A Women’s Development Army: Narratives of Community Health Worker Investment and Empowerment in Rural Ethiopia
Using community health workers: Discipline and Hierarchy in Ethiopia's Women's Development Army
In this article, we use semistructured interviews and documents produced by Ethiopian government officials and international health donors to examine two key features of the nation's community health worker (CHW) program: (1) the process and criteria of selecting community health workers; and (2) policies, rhetoric, and experiences of payment and empowerment. We examine these from the varied perspectives of district health officials, Health Exten…
The Global Context of Vaccine Refusal: Insights from a Systematic Comparative Ethnography of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative
Many of medical anthropology's most pressing research questions require an understanding how infections, money, and ideas move around the globe. The Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) is a $9 billion project that has delivered 20 billion doses of oral polio vaccine in campaigns across the world. With its array of global activities, it cannot be comprehensively explored by the traditional anthropological method of research at one field sit…
Listening to Community Health Workers: How Ethnographic Research Can Inform Positive Relationships Among Community Health Workers, Health Institutions, and Communities
Many actors in global health are concerned with improving community health worker (CHW) policy and practice to achieve universal health care. Ethnographic research can play an important role in providing information critical to the formation of effective CHW programs, by elucidating the life histories that shape CHWs’ desires for alleviation of their own and others’ economic and health challenges, and by addressing the working relationships that …
Does volunteer community health work empower women? Evidence from Ethiopia’s Women’s Development Army
Of the millions of Community Health Workers (CHWs) serving their communities across the world, there are approximately twice as many female CHWs as there are male. Hiring women has in many cases become an ethical expectation, in part because working as a CHW is often seen as empowering the CHW herself to enact positive change in her community. This article draws on interviews, participant observation, document review and a survey carried out in r…
Community health workers and social change: An introduction
Major global health institutions, public and private, currently see community health workers (CHWs) as crucial resources. But the daily experiences and complex motives of CHWs, as well as their concerns and criticisms, remain poorly understood by the institutions that promote their value and draw on their labor. Donors, states, NGOs, and other public health institutions often approach the motivations and performance of CHWs as problems that can b…
Psychosocial distress among unpaid community health workers in rural Ethiopia: Comparing leaders in Ethiopia's Women's Development Army to their peers
Volunteer home-based HIV/Aids care and food crisis in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia: Sustainability in the face of chronic food insecurity
Low-income volunteers constitute a major part of AIDS care workforces in sub-Saharan Africa, yet little research has been conducted to determine how poverty and insecurity among volunteers impact their wellbeing and the sustainability of the AIDS treatment programmes they support. This paper presents longitudinal ethnographic and epidemiological research documenting how the 2008 food crisis in Addis Ababa affected AIDS care volunteers' care relat…
Per Diems in Polio Eradication: Perspectives From Community Health Workers and Officials
Nearly all global health initiatives give per diems to community health workers (CHWs) in poor countries for short-term work on disease-specific programs. We interviewed CHWs, supervisors, and high-level officials (n = 95) in 6 study sites across sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia in early 2012 about the per diems given to them by the Global Polio Eradication Initiative. These per diems for CHWs ranged from $1.50 to $2.40 per day. International of…
Revisiting the Slavery Hypertension Hypothesis
Jackson (2005) raised a number of issues in her response to Armelagos' commentary on the Slavery Hypertension Hypothesis. Armelagos focused on the lack of evidence for a genetic bottleneck that predisposes the descendents of the survivors of the Middle Passage and enslavement to hypertension. He was critical of the acceptance of the Hypothesis without scientific evidence to support it. Armelagos suggested that examining contemporary biocultural p…
A Community Participatory Approach to Identify Common Evaluation Indicators for Community Health Worker Practice
Participatory identification, development, and uptake of a set of common indicators (CI) for CHW practice will allow data to be aggregated at multiple levels, potentially leading to more sustainable financing of CHW programs. Given that measurement drives practice, a set of common CHW indicators can help to preserve the flexibility and integrity of the CHW role
Political connections and psychosocial wellbeing among Women's Development Army leaders in rural amhara, Ethiopia: Towards a holistic understanding of community health workers' socioeconomic status
Cycles of Poverty, Food Insecurity, and Psychosocial Stress Among Aids Care Volunteers in Urban Ethiopia
With the rollout of AIDS therapies, volunteer AIDS care has been promoted across Africa under the assumption that volunteerism is economically imperative in settings of health professional and resource scarcity. As low-income volunteers have become a major part of HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment workforces, it is imperative to question how poverty impacts their well-being. This chapter presents epidemiologic data collected during the 2008 food …
Een prehistorische begraafplaats te Wijshagen (Gem. Meeuwen-Gruitrode)
de voormalige gemeente Gruitrode
Begraafplaats uit de IJzertijd en Romeinse vondsten op "de Rietem" te Wijshagen (gem. Meeuwen-Gruitrode)
Archeologie tussen Gete en Herk (gem. Herk-de-Stad). Interimverslag 1986
Revisiting the Slavery Hypertension Hypothesis
Jackson (2005) raised a number of issues in her response to Armelagos' commentary on the Slavery Hypertension Hypothesis. Armelagos focused on the lack of evidence for a genetic bottleneck that predisposes the descendents of the survivors of the Middle Passage and enslavement to hypertension. He was critical of the acceptance of the Hypothesis without scientific evidence to support it. Armelagos suggested that examining contemporary biocultural p…
Culture, status and context in community health worker pay: Pitfalls and opportunities for policy research. A commentary on Glenton et al. (2010)
Food insecurity and mental health: Surprising trends among community health volunteers in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia during the 2008 food crisis
Volunteer home-based HIV/Aids care and food crisis in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia: Sustainability in the face of chronic food insecurity
Low-income volunteers constitute a major part of AIDS care workforces in sub-Saharan Africa, yet little research has been conducted to determine how poverty and insecurity among volunteers impact their wellbeing and the sustainability of the AIDS treatment programmes they support. This paper presents longitudinal ethnographic and epidemiological research documenting how the 2008 food crisis in Addis Ababa affected AIDS care volunteers' care relat…
Cycles of Poverty, Food Insecurity, and Psychosocial Stress Among Aids Care Volunteers in Urban Ethiopia
With the rollout of AIDS therapies, volunteer AIDS care has been promoted across Africa under the assumption that volunteerism is economically imperative in settings of health professional and resource scarcity. As low-income volunteers have become a major part of HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment workforces, it is imperative to question how poverty impacts their well-being. This chapter presents epidemiologic data collected during the 2008 food …
Volunteerism or Labor Exploitation? Harnessing the Volunteer Spirit to Sustain Aids Treatment Programs in Urban Ethiopia
Based on ethnographic research in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, this paper describes NGO efforts to encourage AIDS care volunteers to eschew material returns for their labor and instead reflect on the goodness of sacrificing to promote the survival of people living with HIV/AIDS. Consensus analysis of motivational survey data collected from a sample of AIDS care volunteers (n=110) suggests that they strongly share a sacrificial and prosocial motivationa…
Methods for evaluating the impact of vertical programs on health systems: Protocol for a study on the impact of the global polio eradication initiative on strengthening routine immunization and primar…
The study design has four major benefits: (1) the careful selection of a range of qualitative case studies allowed for systematic comparison; (2) the use of participant observation yielded important insights on how policy is put into practice; (3) results from our quantitative analysis could be explained by results from qualitative work; and (4) this research protocol can inform the creation of actionable recommendations. Here, recommendations fo…
Water insecurity in 3 dimensions: An anthropological perspective on water and women's psychosocial distress in Ethiopia
Water insecurity is a primary underlying determinant of global health disparities. While public health research on water insecurity has focused mainly on two dimensions, water access and adequacy, an anthropological perspective highlights the cultural or lifestyle dimension of water insecurity, and its implications for access/adequacy and for the phenomenology of water insecurity. Recent work in Bolivia has shown that scores on a water insecurity…
Becoming and remaining community health workers: Perspectives from Ethiopia and Mozambique
Listening to Community Health Workers: How Ethnographic Research Can Inform Positive Relationships Among Community Health Workers, Health Institutions, and Communities
Many actors in global health are concerned with improving community health worker (CHW) policy and practice to achieve universal health care. Ethnographic research can play an important role in providing information critical to the formation of effective CHW programs, by elucidating the life histories that shape CHWs’ desires for alleviation of their own and others’ economic and health challenges, and by addressing the working relationships that …
A Women’s Development Army: Narratives of Community Health Worker Investment and Empowerment in Rural Ethiopia
Volunteers Are Not Paid Because They Are Priceless: Community Health Worker Capacities and Values in an Aids Treatment Intervention in Urban Ethiopia
This article analyzes community health workers' (CHW) capacities for empathic service within an AIDS treatment program in Addis Ababa. I show how CHWs' capacities to build relationships with stigmatized people, reconcile family disputes, and confront death draw on a constellation of values, desires, and emotions encouraged by CHWs' families and religious teachings. I then examine the ways in which the capacities of CHWs were valued by the institu…
Using community health workers: Discipline and Hierarchy in Ethiopia's Women's Development Army
In this article, we use semistructured interviews and documents produced by Ethiopian government officials and international health donors to examine two key features of the nation's community health worker (CHW) program: (1) the process and criteria of selecting community health workers; and (2) policies, rhetoric, and experiences of payment and empowerment. We examine these from the varied perspectives of district health officials, Health Exten…
Community health workers and social change: An introduction
Major global health institutions, public and private, currently see community health workers (CHWs) as crucial resources. But the daily experiences and complex motives of CHWs, as well as their concerns and criticisms, remain poorly understood by the institutions that promote their value and draw on their labor. Donors, states, NGOs, and other public health institutions often approach the motivations and performance of CHWs as problems that can b…
The Global Context of Vaccine Refusal: Insights from a Systematic Comparative Ethnography of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative
Many of medical anthropology's most pressing research questions require an understanding how infections, money, and ideas move around the globe. The Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) is a $9 billion project that has delivered 20 billion doses of oral polio vaccine in campaigns across the world. With its array of global activities, it cannot be comprehensively explored by the traditional anthropological method of research at one field sit…
The Lives of Community Health Workers: Local Labor and Global Health in Urban Ethiopia
The importance of community health workers is increasingly recognized within many of today’s most high-profile global health programs, including campaigns focused on specific diseases and broader efforts to strengthen health systems and achieve universal health care. Based on ethnographic work with Ethiopian women and men who provided home-based care in Addis Ababa during the early roll-out of antiretroviral therapies, this book explores what it …
Experts’ tools, altruists, and job-seekers: Visions of community health workers in Ethiopia’s antiretroviral centre of excellence
This article reports on research conducted during 2007–2008 within an antiretroviral therapy (ART) programme in Addis Ababa, run as a partnership between NGOs, government health officials, and international donors. Through examination of the discourses of professionals in NGO and government sectors, and of the community health workers (CHWs) who delivered ART support and home-based care, I show how a policy of volunteerism worked on the ground, t…
Per Diems in Polio Eradication: Perspectives From Community Health Workers and Officials
Nearly all global health initiatives give per diems to community health workers (CHWs) in poor countries for short-term work on disease-specific programs. We interviewed CHWs, supervisors, and high-level officials (n = 95) in 6 study sites across sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia in early 2012 about the per diems given to them by the Global Polio Eradication Initiative. These per diems for CHWs ranged from $1.50 to $2.40 per day. International of…
Human Resources for Health
The term “human resources for health” (HRH) represents a wide array of people engaged in actions intended primarily to enhance health. In the field of global health in the twenty‐first century, a primary focus is on gaps in the sufficiency and quality of doctors, nurses, midwives, and, more recently, community health workers (CHWs). Since the turn of the century, many global health experts have sought to raise awareness and understandings of geop…
Volunteers in Ethiopia’s women’s development army are more deprived and distressed than their neighbors: Cross-sectional survey data from rural Ethiopia
In rural Amhara, women who seek out and/or are sought and recruited for leader roles in the WDA are a population living in precarity. In several domains, they experience even more hardship than their neighbors. These findings highlight a need for careful attention and further research into processes of volunteer CHW selection, and to determine whether or not volunteering for CHW programs increases socioeconomic and health risks among volunteers. …
Global Health
Global health is a field of expertise that has emerged at the turn of the twenty-first century alongside changing disease profiles, health technologies, and governance structures. This entry provides an overview of the historical conditions that have given rise to the field. It illustrates the new political and financial transformations that have made global health 'global', in contrast to earlier work on international, world, or tropical health.…
Does volunteer community health work empower women? Evidence from Ethiopia’s Women’s Development Army
Of the millions of Community Health Workers (CHWs) serving their communities across the world, there are approximately twice as many female CHWs as there are male. Hiring women has in many cases become an ethical expectation, in part because working as a CHW is often seen as empowering the CHW herself to enact positive change in her community. This article draws on interviews, participant observation, document review and a survey carried out in r…
Medicine (22 works) · Sociology (22 works) · Economic growth (18 works) · Political science (16 works) · Economics (15 works) · Environmental health (14 works) · Psychology (14 works) · Public relations (13 works) · Nursing (12 works) · Geography (11 works)