State Building After Empire: Health Care, Family Planning, and International Aid in North Africa

Aug 07, 2019

Rockefeller Archive Center;

This project explores the origins and expansion of family planning programs in Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria from the 1960s into the 1980s. It asks how and why these North African countries were among the first in Africa and the Middle East to enter into voluntary partnerships with international organizations, and examines the outcomes newly sovereign leaders hoped to achieve. It shows how local leaders forged strategic alliances, albeit with varying levels of commitment, with the Population Council and the Ford Foundation, and later with USAID, the World Bank, and the WHO. Their efforts aimed to secure vital international aid, including financial, material and intellectual resources, that would support their goals to develop a more robust health care infrastructure after the end of empire. This project also demonstrates the contradictions of sovereignty and agency in the post-independence era, for on the one hand, slowed population growth would theoretically secure the North African countries' economic independence, but, on the other hand, independent leaders had to rely on transnational foreign experts for funding and material resources to achieve that goal. This study, therefore, contributes to our understanding of the complex interplay and necessary flexibility and adaptability between newly sovereign states in the Global South and international organizations after decolonization.