Decolonizing Maternal Health 2025

Description of the Immersion:

Location: Johannesburg,  South Africa
Dates: March 22-29, 2025

Rarely do multi-disciplinary, multi-racial, and multicultural providers and practitioners have the opportunity to collectively explore the interventions needed to decolonize the landscape and the broader ecosystem of maternal health. Black Women’s Blueprint (BWB) is privileged to host its second Decolonizing Maternal Health retreat in South Africa to study these interventions in March 2025.

BWB is convening a global gathering, a cross-continental learning-exchange, to achieve the following objectives:

1. Share public and private health solutions for maternal health;
2. Learn culturally specific, innovative, and life-saving practices in maternal health led by Black communities in South Africa;
3. Immerse in a structural, cultural change approach that establishes the foundation for practitioners and advocates to scale diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and core cultural competencies, while addressing maternal mortality and morbidity. Every participant will return home with a clear understanding of the approaches needed to promote health equity.

We invite maternal and newborn health practitioners from the United States, as well as Indigenous midwives, traditional healers, and integrative medicine doctors from South Africa, to come together for a groundbreaking 7-day program of study, ritual, and immersion aimed at decolonizing maternal health.

Annually In the United States, 700 to 900 women die from pregnancy or childbirth-related causes, with approximately 65,000 nearly dying — a record that is among the worst in the developed world. Our country lags far behind our peer nations in preventing and addressing maternal death and morbidity. Despite the breadth of services available, the U.S. struggles to address unmet needs related to access to respectful, high-value, culturally congruent, and trauma-informed maternity services. Regrettably, giving birth and accessing perinatal healthcare in the U.S. is significantly more dangerous, particularly for Black women and other birthing individuals of color, compared to many other countries.

There are outcomes that doctors, midwives, and traditional birth attendants have been able to achieve in terms of interrupting maternal mortality and morbidity; outcomes that have not been possible to replicate in the U.S. to date. Black Women’s Blueprint already possesses anecdotal evidence demonstrating that these interventions have a real impact, preventing maternal mortality and morbidity, and mitigating the effects of trauma and abuse on perinatal outcomes. Through our research, we have explored life-saving strategies to support women in the U.S. and globally.

Our cohort comprises providers in the field of maternal and reproductive health, research-practitioners, and university partners. We will provide a unique opportunity for health practitioners to engage in conversations with traditional healers, gaining a whole new understanding of how childbirth is supported in other contexts.

This transnational learning-exchange is designed for maternal and newborn health practitioners, including physicians, midwives, public health professionals, administrators, reproductive health groups, advocates, policymakers, and researchers. Join us for seven unforgettable days of learning, research, and real-time interventions for maternal health.

Outcomes: 

1. Engage in a collaborative learning exchange for OBGYNs, doctors, nurses, perinatal psychologists, maternal-fetal medicine specialists, and other physicians. This exchange is grounded in the need for community-based, participatory, real-time interventions and action-oriented findings. The goal is to achieve positive outcomes for women and babies, such as reducing complications in pregnancy and childbirth, decreasing maternal mortality, reducing postpartum depression, and enhancing patient-provider satisfaction and experience.
2. Learn about and implement evidence-based, culturally-specific, best practices being done in South Africa within the U.S.
3. Collaboratively design and disseminate information on the impact of culturally-informed maternal health practices. This information aims to improve the well-being of people who give birth in the U.S.
4. Receive ongoing training, coursework, an exclusive syllabus, and access to an online global classroom. This will be done in a cohort of providers and maternal health professionals. Upon returning home, continue learning through classes, workshops, webinars, lectures, and a recorded library of seminars from global scholars. Apply the experiences gained in South Africa to make meaningful contributions to maternal health through these learning opportunities.

Location: Johannesburg,  South Africa
Dates: March 22-29, 2025 

Contact us at:  [email protected]