Paper short abstract:

This analyses ethical concerns of ECD based strategy in the fight of chronic malnutrition in rural contexts in UNICEF programs. Social anthropology allows to emerge and going across dilemmas of the field work on sensitive issues re-structuring the cultural acceptability of the diversity.

Paper long abstract:

Combating malnutrition in rural Africa exposes the humanitarian worker and social anthropologist to a complex dynamic in which scientific rigor, the need for investigation and data collection are grafted onto the professional ethics and discretion of the person.

Fieldwork is practised with victims of complicated delivery and / or with cognitive delays due to chronic malnutrition, mothers with no schooling experience. The operator finds himself to reveal and negotiate sensibilities, meanings, a-priori mental patterns to play them in the daily relationship with the communities

Ethics goes beyond sharing of methods, tools and results, to become an essential dimension of the work itself, it innervates practice and intimate knowledge of anthropology work and the humanitarian impulse.

I found that talking about myself, about my frailties builds a common ground, a shared language, a re balancing of experiences that has a positive impact on families and on outcomes and on the quality of the collected information.

Re-directing anthropological work on the basis of exchange allows the communities involved to contextualise personal critical situation (the child with deficit, malnourished, sometimes socially stigmatised), re-structure their symbolic and social contents and elaborate strategies of acceptance, coexistence and resilience.

In rural Tanzania, the intervention of Doctors with Africa CUAMM and UNICEF in the southern regions aimed at sensory stimulation impacts hundreds of thousands of families. Crossing the ethical dilemma is essential in the toolbox of the social anthropologist, bringing the question of the ethics back to the centre of the scientific debate, to become epistemological the key to interpret the results of its own research.