Seeking the root of health outcomes of Black African immigrants in Vancouver

ZICUSO BC teams up with researchers in a first-of-its-kind study on the social determinants of health for its community

Like most things in life, immigration is not a one-size-fits-all experience.

And yet, all too often, newcomers to Canada are expected to navigate our new communities in similar ways, no matter where we’re from.

Dr. Lawrence Chidzambwa, executive director of the Great Zimbabwe Cultural Society of British Columbia (ZICUSO BC), sees this as a harmful mistake.

“The Black African immigrant experiences are unique,” says Dr. Chidzambwa. With the help of a recent Vancouver Foundation grant, ZICUSO BC will be able to further highlight the distinct needs of his community and find solutions that address African immigrants’ unique cultural contexts.

Black African immigrants have unique needs

When ZICUSO BC opened its doors in 2007, it functioned as both a social hub and tool to help new immigrants from Zimbabwe and its neighbouring countries.

But when COVID-19 struck, the charity realised it would need to level up its services to truly help its community.

“We were shocked to see the number of our members who were out of jobs,” recalls Chidzambwa. “We knew we’d need to help them in some way and food security emerged as the quickest way to help.”

This was a unique problem for ZICUSO BC, due to African cultural attitudes around asking for help and accepting point-blank charity. Chidzambwa and his team knew that the community was not comfortable using local food banks. “We had to approach food from a cultural point of view as there is a stigma attached to food banks. People weren’t going there, they were reluctant.”

With funding, ZICUSO BC pulled together food hampers that featured culturally appropriate food items, delivered in a culturally respectful way. It started out helping 60 families; that number tripled in just a few months.

Obviously, the need was even greater than ZICUSO BC had thought. The team knew that to truly help the community, they would need to go beyond treating the symptom to tackling the problem underneath. “We needed to address this food insecurity issue from a systematic point of view,” says Chidzambwa.

Digging into the root of the issues

To go deeper than meal kits, ZICUSO BC approached Vancouver Foundation with a proposal for a first-of-its-kind research project to better understand how the social determinants of health are affecting Black African immigrants in Canada. Vancouver Foundation awarded the group a Participatory Action Research Grant to support its vision.

Social determinants refer to any non-medical aspects of peoples’ lives that affect their health. This usually includes social, political and economic factors like housing, employment, and cultural attitudes and backgrounds.

“There have been many studies about the impacts of social determinants of health to immigrants… but none that address the unique features for people immigrating from Africa,” explains Chidzambwa. “We want to find out which ones have the highest impact, and come up with some recommendations.”

Immigrating is stressful enough for so many of us. Yet Black African immigrants are also subject to additional stress, due to discrimination and systematic inequalities. Depression, anxiety, sleep and eating disorders are common among this community. One more important, distinct commonality: African immigrants are often not used to advocating for themselves.

“Black African communities are likely to consider some of these ailments as minor, private, or may want to avoid stigma associated with such diseases,” wrote Chidzambwa in ZICUSO BC’s grant application. “As a result, they only go to the hospital or doctor when the situation is dire.”

To help his community help themselves would require a big-picture understanding of cultural attitudes and the forces that shape them, both before and after immigration.

Empowerment comes from understanding

ZICUSO BC’s study aims to dig into social determinants of health, to discover how they impact the deterioration of health in Black immigrant communities in Vancouver. This study is designed with what’s called a participatory action research approach in mind, meaning it’s co-led with members from the community that it studies and researchers. In this case, ZICUSO BC has teamed up with researchers from the Adler University, Vancouver Campus, Department of Public Policy and Administration for the study.

Together, they also will investigate which cultural behaviours prevent Black African immigrants from accessing medical and counselling services.

It’s an ambitious quest, but an admirable one. The ultimate goal? To uncover what
systemic change needs to happen to build healthy and vibrant Black immigrant communities in Metro Vancouver.

“Empowerment involves Black African communities understanding their situation better and coming up with their own solutions to their problems,” writes Chidzambwa.

In other words: Identifying detrimental behaviours will be an inspiration for behaviour change leading to improved outcomes.

As ZICUSO BC embarks on this illuminating research project, which is set to wrap up in the next few months, the food hampers service is still going strong, now helping more than 600 people become more food secure every month. With the knowledge they’ll gather from this landmark study, that number will increase.