The intercultural healthcare approach revisited:understanding indigenous women's participation in healthcare

AIZENBERG, L.

Montevideo

Congreso; V Congreso de la Asociación Latinoamericana de Población; 2012

This article examines how indigenous women who receive intercultural healthcare programs manage to develop cooperation networks, get involved in community affairs and improve their reproductive healthcare. It concentrates on the case of the Bolivian intercultural program ?EXTENSA? and analyzes how this program is successful at activating greater community participation in health prevention and thus, improving the reproductive healthcare of the indigenous women who live in the Department of Beni, Bolivia. Through a qualitative analysis, it argues that increasing community participation and healthy behaviors are not associated with overcoming the cultural barrier with the modern medicine, as the intercultural healthcare approach would have expected. Indigenous women?s community participation and healthy behaviors should be reinterpreted as the result of tapping into bonding social capital. The analysis shows that the program gives access to community leaders and networks members (who predate EXTENSA) to economic, educational and political resources, providing them with new opportunities. In this process, it does not transform cultural values or behaviors but instead transform women?s community assets into sources of community empowerment.