Untraditionally traditional: Rethinking maternal health advocacy in south Sudan

What is the role of local knowledge in creating sustainable health systems and using aid effectively? This presentation will detail a project in post-conflict South Sudan, where the Maternal Mortality Ratio (estimated at 2054/100,000 live births) was the worst in the world in 2011. The project focused on community capacity building to identify maternal health concerns and to design and deliver context-specific interventions. Utilizing innovative participatory research and local resources to increase sustainability, this project connected seven skilled health professionals with fifteen local women from fifteen different villages in South Sudan. Photos and storytelling served as novel means to collect data in a low-literacy community and context-sensitive workshops to prioritize maternal health concerns utilized indigenous knowledge for crafting more effective health maternal messages. This project improved community awareness of maternal health issues and empowered women; the original fifteen women managed to train a further fifty-five local men and women, generating a measurable, multiply effect. We will subsequently discuss what we can extrapolate from such an example into the larger aid context, arguing that community-based initiatives utilizing local resources, even if funded by larger aid organizations, can have a lasting, sustainable impact.