The Engagement Matters Podcast
Season 1, Episode 8
Jessica White, the Global Midwives’ Hub Lead from Direct Relief and the International Confederation of Midwives shares how her team engages a global network of midwives to use Esri tools to support data-driven advocacy and decision-making.
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Background
Supporting women during pregnancy and childbirth – the profession of a midwife – is probably the oldest profession on the planet, with records of midwives dating back over 3,600 years ago. Today, more than 1.7 million midwives serve communities all over the world. Yet, given how ubiquitous midwives have been throughout history, they still face one overriding challenge: misconceptions about who they are and what they can do. In North America, midwives are sometimes viewed as an “alternative” health provider, with obstetric care considered the norm. In other parts of the world, midwives are much more integrated into health systems and are a normal part of the health service; however, despite extensive training and deep local need, midwives are restricted in the services they can provide to women, girls and families. That’s where groups like Direct Relief and the International Confederation of Midwives (ICM) come in. These organizations are using engagement, advocacy, and empowerment, to work to ensure that midwives are recognized as a critical component of the global healthcare system regardless, of if their clients live in a skyscraper in a big city or in a mud hut in a rural village.
Starting with advocacy
Jessica White, the Global Midwives’ Hub Lead that works with Direct Relief and the International Confederation of Midwives, coordinates a team that’s focused on using data to advocate for midwives. Her goal is to “elevate the work of midwives” and help us all see the spectrum of care that midwives can and do provide. Jessica’s work starts with educating the different groups of people that she speaks to and helping to break down stereotypes that we might have about midwives. Common talking points that she brings up include:
- Midwives do more than deliver babies: Midwives are primary health providers for women, girls, and gender diverse people, who have the competencies to provide 90% of the sexual, reproductive, maternal, and adolescent health needs.
- Midwives support more than just pregnant women: They have the skills to support a woman’s overall health goals as well as those of her family. When enabled by a health system, the profession can provide a wide breadth of services, outlined in the Essential Competencies for Midwifery Practice.
Jessica’s work to advocate for midwives around the world also focuses on making it clear that midwives and doctors work in tandem, not at odds with one another. In the end, her objective is to highlight the benefits of midwives in communities and how they support better health outcomes. It’s no surprise then that communicating those outcomes means she leverages a lot of data and visualizations.
Following up advocacy with empowerment
The second goal of Jessica’s work at ICM is to empower midwives by giving them “the support and the resources that they need to care for their communities effectively and confidently.” In this context, advocacy from ICM helps start the conversations globally and regionally.
Knowing what midwives need is no small feat and is something that Jessica relies on ICM’s six regional professional committees (RPCs) that exist in regions around the world. These RPCs are made up of midwives who work as educators, legislators, clinicians, and emerging leaders, who collaborate directly with their fellow midwives on the local level. That helps Jessica’s team understand the common needs across regions so that she can build innovative tools and curated datasets that empower midwives within their regions. The RPCs also collaborate between Jessica’s global efforts and local midwives to highlight and translate the global resources back down to the local needs. It’s a virtuous cycle of local needs flowing up to a global perspective where Jessica can lay a digital foundation that then supports and empowers midwives everywhere.
The Global Midwives’ Hub
Showcasing all this content – visualizations, data, stories, reports – is done through the Global Midwives’ Hub. In once place, the Hub brings together key statistics and data about midwives, maternal, but also sexual and reproductive services, that can be used for advocacy, and ultimately, decision and policy-making. Jessica’s vision for the Hub is to have it be a tool for both her advocacy efforts on behalf of midwives as well as her empowerment efforts that help midwives tell their own stories. The stories and data are open to anyone to read and interact with. That helps the advocacy efforts of educating the global public. The best part is that the Hub is designed to be used by midwives with little/no technical expertise and that are often more comfortable with amniotic fluid than they are with data or technology. Midwives and the RPCs can share their own, validated data to the site where it’s hosted and visualized by Jessica’s team for use by midwives, decisionmakers, advocates and the public.
Driving positive impact globally
Over the long term, Jessica sees these engagement efforts through the Global Midwives’ Hub as supporting her core mantra: “Data drives insights, and insights drive change.” As more advocates, policymakers and midwives use the Hub, the narratives around midwives and their potential to help solve global health inequalities will become more mainstream. Hopefully, along the way, stereotypes about midwives will be dispelled and their true value realized by a broad majority of the public. A 2021 State of World’s Midwifery report from the WHO found that the world needs 900,000 more midwives – post-COVID, that number is surely over 1 million. As this type of data is shared, the Hub’s usefulness will grow empowering midwives through educational institutions, better legislation, and better-informed communities, ultimately leading to better health outcomes for women and families worldwide.
Learn more or get involved
To learn more about the International Confederation of Midwives – and to connect with a national midwifery association to learn how to study to become a midwife yourself – visit internationalmidwives.org.
To learn more about the Global Midwives’ Hub and read their stories and see their data, visit globalmidwiveshub.org.
If you are interested in learning more about ArcGIS Hub – a no-code solution from Esri for creating websites (“sites”) that support stakeholder collaboration and engagement – you can follow this podcast series, read these blog articles, view examples from the ArcGIS Hub community in the Hub Gallery, or watch these instructional videos.
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