1. Paradoxes of Patrimony: Family Planning, Youth Volunteering, and Becoming 'Big' in Uganda
- Author
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Lorist, Jeroen and Moyer, Eileen
- Subjects
Security guards ,Non-governmental organizations ,Teenagers ,Youth ,Gender equality ,Reproductive health ,Family planning ,Volunteerism ,Political science ,Regional focus/area studies ,Social sciences - Abstract
This article examines the experiences and motivations of young volunteers engaged in the development domain of sexual and reproductive health and rights in Uganda. While promoting various family-planning projects, volunteers deftly navigated human-rights discourses of international donors, norms of religious leaders, and development narratives of national policymakers as they attempted to advance their own life projects. Through the creation of new narratives and their agency, the volunteers translated, reformed, and re-presented Global North development discourse as part of a situated theorization on development problems. Simultaneously these educated, middle-class youth embraced the discursively vague field of family planning as the likeliest avenue for social mobility by becoming 'big' within national and local patrimonial and patriarchal systems. Although such family-planning programs do seem to allow some volunteers to achieve their goals, they paradoxically reproduce the patriarchal systems that gender-equality NGOs aim to dismantle., Setting the Stage: Volunteering for Gender Equality or Family Planning? Fourteen young men and women are gathered at midday in a dusty space amid shanty-like structures next to a busy [...]
- Published
- 2023
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