Challenges to human and non-human health overlap in the Anthropocene increasingly with those to wider environmental processes. Alterations to atmospheric composition and resulting climate change affect water supply, food production, vegetation cover and ecological diversity, and create conditions for the spread of disease. Human-made toxicants, released from agriculture and mining, industrial production and waste deposition, create localised health emergencies, persist and sediment over time, and spread globally through active and passive transport, accumulate in food chains, and contribute to the world-wide rise in chronic, non-communicable diseases, including cancer.
East Africa, too, faces critical health transformations: emerging non-communicable diseases like cancer, diabetes and hypertension, and emerging viral epidemics, compounded by rapid environmental change and mounting pollution, and changes in life-style and class structure. Anthropology is uniquely situated to understand and engage with such complexity, and to contribute to critical thinking concerning the origins of these problems and scientific research about them, and to guide effective activism, as well as sustainable protective policies and interventions.
In recent decades, universities in East Africa and elsewhere on the continent have successfully built up the previously neglected field of anthropology, with a particular emphasis on medical anthropology. Anthropology graduates find employment in development, health promotion, medical research and the civil service. Yet, despite considerable progress, postgraduate training and academic recruitment still often rely upon institutions outside the region. Moreover, medical anthropological expertise is largely geared towards infectious diseases, rather than emerging chronic diseases and related environmental health factors, and their underlying historical, political, social and economic origins. MEA.21 will focus on these emerging challenges, and build and expand sustainable, cutting-edge training and research in medical-environmental anthropology for Eastern Africa.
The programme will be anchored in some of East Africa’s oldest universities – Nairobi, Dar es Salaam and Makerere - and a younger University with deep historical roots and a strong anthropology tradition - Maseno. MEA.21 will strengthen the ties between these institutions, establish and revise postgraduate training programmes in medical anthropology and develop health-relevant environmental anthropology, through a regionally integrated, research-heavy training and capacity building approach.