ABSTRACT
Introduction In an unprecedented move in 2005, the World Health Organization (WHO) commissioned a consortium of university-based researchers to go out into the field to find and map any religious communities and institutions that were engaged in HIV/AIDS and healthcare more generally in Zambia and Lesotho (ARHAP 2006). What is most interesting about this small commission was that it originated from a realization within the WHO, the world’s premier public health authority, that there was no currently available information on the presence or contribution of religion to healthcare in development contexts. Said differently, no one knew what religious healthcare entities were out there, what they were doing or even where they were. This was acerbated by the realization that the WHO’s existing mapping and assessment system at the time, the Service Availability Mapping (SAM) system, did not have a category for religious institutions engaged in healthcare – so, in effect, could not ‘see’ them.
