The Dynamics of Faith-based Organisations’ Healthcare Interventions in Urban Tanzania: An Ethnographic Inquiry of Direct Aid and Bethel Revival Temple

Abstract

The study examines the ways the new generation of Christian and Muslim Faith-based Organisations (FBOs) have become engaged in the healthcare interventions in Urban Tanzania in recent decades. The study examines character and content of their healthcare interventions as well as religious and professional motivations for their healthcare workers, followers, beneficiaries and management. The study employs the concept of religion as a model for, and model of lived reality by Geertz (1973); and the concept of development as holistic by Bornstein (2005). Ethnographically, the study examines how religious discourses were embodied in social practices, how social and historical processes led to this particular embodiment, and how religion itself defined the discourses and practices of FBOs Healthcare Interventions in the context of changing socio-economic, and political circumstances since 1990s to 2020. Findings showed that FBOs healthcare activities were designed as alternatives for their beneficiaries and the general public access healthcare services, particularly for those coming from weak socioeconomic backgrounds and in the absence of sufficient community and family support. Religious ideas, practices and meanings motivated FBOs healthcare workers, followers and the management to engage in healthcare interventions and express for the same using spaces created by social, economic, and political changes since the mid-1990s.
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