The Centre for Maternal and Child Health Research at the School of Health and Medical Sciences, City St George's, University of London welcome Tolulope Esther Fadeyi, PhD to discuss how maternal vaccination carried out by midwives and traditional birth attendants can improve maternal health, as part of the SHMS research seminar series
Abstract
"The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries saw accounts of maternal immunisation in low- and middle-income countries, focusing on policy frameworks, coverage targets, and the work of international agencies. Existing histories suggest that vaccines move smoothly from programme design to population-level impact. They were the products of negotiations between trained midwives and programme officers, who sought to validate the efficacy of vaccine uptake among pregnant women. In this talk, I argue that the labour required to make this movement possible is less visible, particularly in rural communities in LMICs where Traditional Birth Attendants (TBAs) persist.
I ask a simple question: who, in practice, does immunisation work in Nigeria? I argue that maternal vaccination should not be seen as a technical intervention but as a form of everyday, situated labour carried out by midwives and traditional birth attendants, which could improve maternal health. Midwives administer vaccines, reassure women about vaccine uptake, and track women across fragmented systems. TBAs play a significant role in encouraging attendance and mediating between midwives and pregnant women in rural Nigeria.
By bringing these two actors into dialogue, I aim to shift the narrative around programmes such as maternal and neonatal tetanus elimination towards the forms of labour that are relational, gendered, and often overlooked in historical analysis. Rethinking maternal immunisation in this way offers a different perspective on both the past and the present. It highlights the need to recognise the voices that sustain these programmes, which have long remained at the margins of medical history."
About the speaker
Tolulope Esther Fadeyi, PhD is a historian of medicine and science specialising in African medical history. She currently serves as a Research Associate on the Wellcome Trust Antimicrobial Resistance project at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine (CHSTM) at the University of Manchester. Her research examines the roles of traditional birth attendants, mission maternities, and evolving pharmacological interventions in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Her ongoing work contributes to global debates on maternal and neonatal vaccination, Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR), maternal pharmacognosy, therapeutic governance in perinatal and obstetric pharmacy, and the history of midwifery in LMICs. She is particularly interested in how informal health providers, often dismissed in policy circles, became crucial actors in disseminating modern therapeutics in rural Nigeria. Her academic training spans African history, global health policy, colonial archives, and reproductive health. She is committed to oral history, ethnography, and interdisciplinary research.
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