Malaria and COVID-19: What Role Does Gender Play in these Two Health Crises?

The COVID-19 pandemic has amplified awareness of the gendered impacts of infectious disease. The work of feminist activists, economists, and academics proves that while the virus disregards gender, its economic and other impacts are anything but gender neutral. During the pandemic, the world has seen accelerating levels of violence against women, and worldwide, women’s economic circumstances have taken a hit, due to increased and unpaid caregiving and the fact that women are more likely to work in insecure, low-paid, and informal jobs.

Over the past year, I worked with Kati Collective and Malaria No More to understand the gender dynamics of another infectious disease – malaria. The project started pre-pandemic but was rapidly illuminated by emerging data and thinking on gender and COVID.

The team working together at Kati and Malaria No More uncovered a story about malaria that is very similar to the emerging narrative on COVID and gender. Given equal exposure to the disease, men and women are infected by malaria in equal numbers, yet malaria’s economic and social impacts are disproportionately felt by women and girls. For example, women and adolescent girls do the majority of unpaid caregiving for family members sick with malaria, meaning that they are less likely to attend school, have work outside the home, or have the capacity to play leadership roles in their communities. As with COVID, women play the majority of paid and unpaid roles managing the disease (as community health workers, for example), but all too often their voices are missing in thought leadership and public conversations about how to address it. 

Thanks to growing scholarship and leadership across the malaria community, we identified many emerging lessons about how a gender lens can help ensure that malaria response is responsive to gender and is therefore higher impact. Critical lessons also relevant to COVID-19 response include: creating more opportunities for women in healthcare leadership (particularly for women with community-level experience); making sure that data collected about the disease is “gender disaggregated”; and initiating research, programs, and advocacy that tackle the systemic barriers women and girls may face in managing and responding to disease (for example, malaria initiatives that tackle the lack of agency women may have in seeking healthcare for themselves or their children). For more on this topic, read Kati Collective’s recent blog post Paved by Women: Accelerating a Pathway to Eradicating Malaria.

Perhaps the biggest gender lesson that crosscuts COVID-19 and malaria is about investments in disease treatment and prevention and in building community resilience and recovery. Malaria shows us that repercussions of infectious disease can be hidden inhibitors of women’s rights and opportunities. This holds whole communities back. Solving the problems of disease can become intractable when gender is not part of the equation. A gender investment lens accelerates positive healthcare outcomes, and – by addressing the often hidden social and economic costs of disease – can unlock new community assets and resources.

As governments, health experts, and economists navigate the old and new battles against malaria and COVID-19, women and girls must be central to our analysis, our solutions, and to investments in “building back better.”

Graphic created by Jenny Soderbergh.