‘All they do is pray’: Community labour and the narrowing of ‘care’ during Mozambique's HIV scale-up.

This paper tracks the intertwined biographies of a community home-based care (CHBC) volunteer, Arminda, the community-based organisation she worked for, Mufudzi, and the HIV scale-up in Mozambique. The focus is on Arminda – the experiences, aspirations, skills, and values she brought to her work as a volunteer, and the ways her own life converged with the rise and fall of the organisation that pioneered CHBC in this region. CHBC began in Mozambique in the mid-1990s as a community-level response to the AIDS epidemic at a time when there were few such organised efforts. The rapid pace and technical orientation of the scale-up as well as the influx of funding altered the practice of CHBC by expanding the scope of the work to become more technically comprehensive, but at the same time more narrowly defining ‘care’ as clinically-oriented work. Over the course of the scale-up, Arminda and her colleagues felt exploited and ultimately abandoned, despite their work having served as the vanguard and national model for CHBC. This paper considers how this happened and raises questions about the communities constituted by global health interventions and about the role of and the voice of community health workers in large-scale interventions such as the HIV scale-up. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]