The Health of Women and Girls in Urban Areas with a Focus on Kenya and South Africa: A Review, 2013.
Kate Hawkins, Hayley MacGregor and Rose Oronje. Institute of Development Studies.
With respect to the kinds of ‘evidence’ prevalent in the literature, the review revealed a bias towards quantitative biomedical research evidence with a narrow disease focus, which has dominated debates on urban health in developing countries, at the expense of qualitative as well as gender-focused analyses reflecting a broader range of the interconnecting health concerns of women and girls. The knowledge that appears to have dominated debates on urban health in developing countries is largely quantitative, whereas qualitative evidence, including experiential knowledge of poor and marginalised groups that live in informal settlements, has been less prominent.
The bias in the existing body of knowledge on urban health in developing countries has thus to a large extent silenced the voices of the inhabitants of these areas in key decision-making processes. Indeed, it has been argued that relativist scientific knowledge and lay knowledge, although often marginalised in the health sector, are critical in decision-making as they capture contextual issues, which are critical for policy action (Theobald and Nhlema-Simwaka 2008). It has also meant that some important determinants of health have received less attention. Much of the existing evidence does not
provide much insight on how gender inequalities interact with the health disadvantage of living in poor urban settings. Critics have argued that urban health studies often ignore the political and systemic nature of social stratification, instead studying the health impact of decontextualised and isolated characteristics of population groups.
