Maternal health is often spoken about in terms of hospitals, policies, and clinical outcomes. Yet for many communities, the experience of pregnancy, birth, and recovery begins long before any clinical encounter and continues long after it ends. It is shaped in homes, in conversations between women, in the guidance of elders, and in systems of knowledge that have been lived, refined, and passed down across generations.
This project, Indigenous Knowledge Systems and the Intimate Worlds of Maternal Care, emerges from that recognition. It is an effort to document, reflect on, and engage with Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) as living infrastructures of maternal care. Rather than treating these systems as “alternative” or supplementary, this work approaches them as central to how maternal wellbeing is understood and practiced in many African communities.
bridgingbirth 