Sex, Fertility and the Marabouts: Cultural Conceptions of Family Planning in Mali (2011)

Undergraduate: Laurence Deschamps-Laporte

Faculty Advisor: Amy Cooke
Department: International & Area Studies

---

Statistics show that Malian women still have an unmet need for family planning, yet public health and international development NGOs as well as foreign governments’ development agencies and local governments (referred to as the reproductive establishment in this paper) have tried to meet their need for contraception by increasing funding and efforts in the last two decades. Contraceptive use rates in Mali are strikingly low compared to regional statistics. How can we explain Malian women’s unmet need for family planning? After conducting ethnographic research in Mali and analyzing data from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS), I conclude that the reproductive establishment can improve their programming in five areas of intervention: access, education and information, cultural and legal barriers, financial barriers and symptomatic problems related to the field international development. Beyond these areas of intervention the reproductive establishment is already mindful of, my research suggests that they could better address women’s family planning needs if they considered two new factors which influence women’s reproductive decisions, namely; local understandings of fertility and the role of the Islamic traditional healers (called marabouts). This research interweaves public health and anthropological considerations on the field of family planning in francophone West Africa and provides practical insights that can contribute to better family planning practices in Mali.