With biomedicine at its primary disciplinary denominator, the rigor of measurement and randomization has trickled into the epistemic and ontological practices of public health, global health, and social medicine — owing to which, the successes, and the failures of programmatic interventions are usually expressed in terms of evidence that is quantified, and expressed in generaliseable terms. In fact, most evaluatory practices centre the programme, instead of centring the community towards whom the programmes are focused. This is reflected in how the standards for evaluation are driven and expressed in terms of economic and statistical indicators such as feasibility, utility, propriety, and accuracy of the programme. More recently, data generated through the experimental methods of randomised controlled trials, in the form of randomised programme evaluations, has become the benchmark of credible and robust evidence.
These evaluatory techniques are carried out in order to generate evidence supporting arguments for the replication, and scaling-up of similar health interventions in diverse contexts. But a question that is scarcely answered through programmatic evaluations, is, how do these interventions impact humans, communities, and nations? This is rather ironic, because global health measures are seemingly driven by the cause of supporting planetary well-being. Moreover, how do the programmatic interventions complicate the everydayness of extant lived inequalities? Lastly, what ends does this data, and the modes of knowledge production serve?
This paper tries to explore the foregoing questions by applying a critical lens to current standards of global health programme evaluations. Furthermore, it tries to explore the futures, roles, and potentialities of medical anthropology in helping to centre the “human” and it’s attendant entanglements in the burgeoning field of global social medicine.
