Constructing Success: The World Bank, Onchocerciasis Control, and What Lies Beneath Triumphalist Global Health Narratives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Summary Using a historical case study of the World Bank and World Health Organization (WHO)’s Onchocerciasis Control Programme (OCP, 1972–2002), I explore how success is conceptualised in global health and why it matters for policy and priority-setting. First, I summarise the ‘dominant’ OCP success narrative that has emerged since the 1980s, which is based on public health, socio-economic and humanitarian justifications for the programme’s effectiveness. Next, I analyse how socio-economic metrics linking the programme’s disease control to increased labour productivity and agricultural land availability evolved in the 1980–90s. This alternative analysis of the OCP demonstrates how metrics, particularly when divorced from their assumptions and political context, are pliable and constructible. I argue that the OCP’s success was actively constructed by the World Bank and that moving beyond triumphalist, programme-level ‘lessons-learned’ approaches within global health requires disruption of the epistemic, institutional and discursive power that ‘lies beneath’ success narratives.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".