Held during the 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence campaign, the Imarisha consortium is delighted to convene the webinar, “Rethinking How We Address Gendered Workplace Violence in Primary Healthcare Settings: Open Dialogue with Abi Badru”, which aims to discuss potential measures and explore actionable strategies that could be adopted to protect primary healthcare workers from gendered workplace violence.
Evidence indicates that more than 60% of health workers experience some form of workplace violence (WPV). Given the scale and severity, workplace violence constitutes a global systemic crisis within healthcare, undermining the safety, well-being, and agency of healthcare workers, especially at primary health care (PHC) level. Women, who comprise the majority of the PHC workforce, are further exposed to gendered workplace violence driven by gendered occupational hierarchies, societal restrictive norms, and entrenched power inequalities replicated and reinforced within health systems. Despite its prevalence and substantial impacts, workplace violence and its gender dimensions remain under-documented, under-problematised, and excluded from programmatic action and institutional agendas at global, national, and local levels.
As policy attention on workplace violence remains limited and measures to protect the workforce - where existent – are often fragmented and insufficient, there is an urgent need to move beyond top-down procedural and technocratic frameworks toward transformative approaches rooted in decolonial feminist epistemologies. Reimagining prevention, reporting, accountability to address workplace violence in health settings needs a more deliberate transformation of institutional conditions, norms, and power relations that enable, normalise, and sustain violence in the first place.
This webinar will thus take the format of an open dialogue with Moradeke Abiodun-Badru, Public Services International’s Project Coordinator implementing PSI’s health sector projects in West Africa, whose extensive experience as a registered nurse and union leader in Nigeria as well as through her international role, grounds her insights at the intersections of labor rights, health policy development, gender equality, and collective organising at both national and international levels.
The conversation will be facilitated by Johanna Riha of UNU-IIGH and Arlette Zongo of RESADE. Through this conversation the webinar will introduce PSI, share the work they are doing to tackle gendered workplace violence, explore empirical evidence of effective action, discussing success stories and challenges from across various African contexts for creating safe, equitable, and enabling work environments for all healthcare professionals.
