Interrogating male involvement in sexual and reproductive health rights campaign in Rukungiri District, Uganda: gaps and prospects for gender equality
Abstract
This is a qualitative study to establish the existing male involvement strategies in SRHR in Rukungiri district. The study set out to explore the challenges and prospects of male involvement streatgies in the district. It involved a qualitative approach to understand narratives about male involvement, situating them within the distinct social context. The study participants included district local government health officials, private health service providers, community leaders, and ordinary men and women most of whom were of reproductive age, with knowledge of family planning and antenatal health care. The study established the existing male involvement strategies in SRHR as men escorting their pregnant spouses for antenatal visits, and delivery services and involving in other reproductive decisions like family planning, ensuring good mental health and nutrition for their pregnant spouses as well as supporting household chores to relieve their spouses from overworking while pregnant. While most of the strategies resonated with the national and global mechanisms for involving men in SRHR, they nonetheless involved local innovations and contextual barriers like cultural constraints, for example, social ridicule and stigmatization of men who participate in SRHR, the information flow, the lack of experts to disseminate information, the growing need to work and compete in the capitalistic world even at the expense of one‟s health, as well as the masculine patriarchal backlash in the area. Other constraints were the conceptual inadequacies of the strategy that make it less appealing to men who accuse the framing of being instrumentalist; the failure of male involvement strategists to specify which men to involve using which resources and for what motive making its implementation essentialist; and as well as failure by certain feminist groups to welcome these initiatives on grounds that they will reintroduce male hegemonies and compete for the same resources with feminist groups. The study concludes that the male involvement strategy in SRHR exists in Rukungiri and is informed by the national and global calls to involve men in achieving gender equality, although with faced with multiple contextual constraints highlighted above. The study recommends the hiring of male involvement specialists to carry on the effective implementation of this strategy, the adoption of alternative information mechanisms, ensuring gender-balanced staffing in the child and maternal health departments, deliberate attention to contentious issues in the framing of the strategy anchoring the strategy within the feminist principles to avoid rolling back feminist gains (gender backlash).