My intention is to save lives, says woman behind male cut

Dr Kawango Agot has scored many firsts but she did not think she would make history as the first woman to head research on male circumcision.

With an educational background in social science, she rose to head a team of senior researchers and consultants in the medical and science fields in 2002 who generated results that have got the world talking.

She says many people have mistaken her academic title to mean she is a medical doctor. People have heard her name and expected to see a man, perhaps because they do not expect a woman, and a Luo one for that matter, to lead a male circumcision drive.

“There are no challenges that are insurmountable and you will have scored big to intimidate me,” Dr Agot says.

At an international conference, Dr Agot recalls with laughter how organisers were forced to make last-minute adjustments after they initially booked her in the same room as her male boss, thinking she was a man.

No challenges

She says she is not turning her own people’s culture on its head, as she has been accused of doing, because there is a difference between male circumcision as a cultural practice and for health benefits, as the former is a rite of passage and confers cultural identity.

“Our research on circumcision, whose results we are disseminating, was for purposes of HIV prevention. It is not a cultural issue, it is a public health issue. I knew it would be misinterpreted as infringing on Luo culture, but my primary concern was public health benefits,” she says.

While there have been mixed reactions to the research results, she says a majority of people have supported the cut for HIV prevention and other health benefits.

And though some Luo elders spoke out against it, she says, “We are only differing on semantics. We are advocating male circumcision for health benefits and saying it should be offered as part of a comprehensive HIV-prevention package.”

This comprehensive package includes counselling and testing, condom education and distribution, STI diagnosis and treatment, and behavioural risk reduction, in addition to circumcision.
Dr Agot says that her interest in the subject started back in 1989 when she was in a masters class at Moi University.

“I was studying food and nutrition but held a keen interest in HIV/Aids. At that time, there were very few intervention programmes to contain its spread,” she says.

Her prayer to get the opportunity to do something on HIV prevention was answered when she received a grant from the Organisation for Social Science Research in Eastern and Southern Africa to study the relationship between the spread of HIV and wife inheritance, polygamy and migration.

And she found that polygamy was a non-issue in the spread of HIV. Instead, casual, multiple sexual partners were the main contributor then, and even today.

“As I was reading through some academic books on HIV, I bumped into one that suggested a link with male circumcision and it made a lot of sense to me,” she says. The more she read books about the male cut, the more interested she became.