Mobilizing Mothers and Empowering Women: Comprehensive Rural Health Projects in India and Bangladesh

Many global health experts, then and now, would agree with Colin McCord's 1976 assessment that "the application of the rural health centre concept around the world has to be one of the most dismal records of failure in the history of medicine." This article focuses on two important exceptions, successful and enduring rural health care projects begun in India and Bangladesh in the early 1970s. It draws on newly available archival sources to show how local physicians built comprehensive rural health care projects from the bottom up, funded by international NGOs but administratively independent of them. Where previous studies primarily explore rural health care <i>for</i> mothers and children, this one looks at village mothers as health care providers, trained to care for their own communities.