Waiting in a Place of Impossible Demands: Surveillance-Care in a Tanzanian Maternity Waiting Home.

Today in rural Tanzania, nurses instruct pregnant women to go to maternity waiting homes (MWH), spaces of surveillance-care, long before due dates. Envisioned as a place risk in policies of global safe motherhood, ethnography shows how the MWH becomes a place risk to pregnant women and nurses. Negotiations at the MWH show how surveillance-care can be used to control and reinforce hierarchies - inadvertently creating risk - but also, in surprising ways, mitigate risk by insisting on other forms of care.

"We Only Escort Women to the Health Facility": Traditional birth attendants and the performance of indicator-driven care in rural Tanzania.

Global health regimes have reversed the role of traditional birth attendants (TBAs) from partners in the fight against maternal and child mortality to barriers to indicator-driven care. In rural Tanzania, widespread fear of government surveillance and punishment for non-compliant individuals and organizations that climaxed during the presidency of the late John Magufuli (2015-2021) put increased pressure on TBAs. To negotiate tensions, TBAs adopted the position that they only escort women to health facilities for birth.

Homebirth fines and health cards in rural Tanzania: On the push for numbers in maternal health.

Over the last two decades, there has been a global push to improve maternal health by increasing numbers of facility births in low- and middle-income countries like Tanzania. While recent scholarship has interrogated the increasing hegemony of numbers and metrics in global health, few have ethnographically explored how this push for numbers and its accompanying technologies affect the lived experiences of parturients and those who care for them during pregnancy and childbirth in rural communities. Based on seven months of multi-sited ethnographic research conducted in three different rural communities in Mpwapwa District in 2016, this article explores how mothers and nurses in Tanzania experienced the push for numbers in maternal health, particularly as that push is enacted through homebirth fines and health cards.

The silencing of political context in health research in Ethiopia: why it should be a concern.

In 2004, the Ethiopian government launched what has been called an innovative and groundbreaking solution to the country's public health challenges; the Health Extension Programme (HEP). The positive public health outcomes that have been reported following the implementation of the HEP have led researchers and global health actors to propose it as a model for other countries to emulate. In this systematic review, we point to a potential weakness and methodological bias in the existing research.