Working with Religious Communities to Shift the Conversation on Women's Health Issues

By: Musimbi Kanyoro Elizabeth Tenety

April 9, 2015

Dr. Musimbi Kanyoro, president and CEO of the Global Fund for Women, discusses how partnerships with religious communities and medical staff can facilitate productive conversations on sensitive issues like HIV/AIDS, female genital mutilation, and child marriage in a way that ultimately empowers women.


What are the ways that you as an advocate try to engage religious communities on issues of women’s health and empowerment?

     
Religious groups are very well involved in the area of health. They have been leaders and initiators there for a long time. They are very well involved in providing services.  

We have to choose those battles [with religious communities] that have potential. But I think they’re not going to deal with sensitive issues like abortion; I think the conversation has to be directed from a health perspective. If we start from an ethical or moral perspective, religious people would find arguments in favor of abortion rights difficult to deal with.  

But the conversation has to be, in my opinion, around what kind of conversation we need to have and what kind of shift in language. If that doesn't happen, it compromises religious belief systems, and it also compromises what you want—to have justice in women's health. Those of us who are actually involved in promoting issues of women's health want to frame the conversation on health grounds rather than engaging with the religious side. And so the fight continues.  

Could you give me an example that you've seen about shifting the conversation from morals and theology to health?
 

I think we can go far with the history of how abortions became an issue of choice in the USA.
  Women’s health advocates can look to the way we engaged with Catholics about abortion becoming legal (in the 1970s).  It was because they saw the immense number of women who lost their lives [to underground abortions]. And they were convinced that was not the right thing and so some of them became advocates.  

So, abortion being legalized in the United States in the way it did is one example. I think we need to study some of those cases.  

We also need to involve a lot more of the medical staff that are religious to advocate. I noticed that during the time of high occurrence of HIV, religious health workers were able to speak to the problem and some potential solutions, and shifts were able to happen. There was some opposition from religious groups, and then they shifted when they saw that the way to make a difference was to be able to act together with the people. Whether they were sex workers or not, anybody that needed help needed to be worked with.  

So we need to be able to try and see what has worked before. We need to learn from the HIV example in particular, because a number of religious people became quite active around that cause.  

There are people, for example, saying, "We want abortion to become legal." I think we shouldn't begin by saying we want abortion to become legal. It is the same with female genital mutilation (FGM). The reason that FGM is now unacceptable to some communities and religious leaders is because a lot of statistical information has indicated it’s medically harmful. That’s an argument because people seem to adjust to the fact that they're seeing something that is not healthy. They adjust because of the health argument, not because it’s something that is moral or not moral.  

Related—have you had any success making the health argument to traditional communities or religious leaders to encourage delayed marriage for girls?
 

Well, delayed marriage for girls is on the right track. We saw it recently in Malawi [which recently passed a law raising the legal age of marriage from 15 to 18] where there are numerous campaigns for it.  It is now getting such prominence, and there will be an improvement in that area of child marriage. Child marriage is not just a matter involving religious people, according to the extent to which it is different from the culture or grassroots family issues. It is difficult to deal with because it's done very much at the family level. But I don't think that now it is realistic to say that religion per se has been supporting child marriage. 
 

Another issue that you and your organization have gotten involved with recently is the emergence of girls and women and technology. Are there specific opportunities to improve health outcomes of girls and women through technology?
 

Yes. A number of healthcare workers are saying that through technology many young people are freer to say what they think. I think that the big thing with technology is that it gives power directly to the people to enact change. Thus it will become a part of the community where the girls are, and the girls can be able to use it to work toward their own freedom, their own choices that keep them free.
    
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