Pilot Study
Assessing Effect of Weather Conditions on Journey To and Outcome of Emergency Obstetric and Newborn care in Benin City, Nigeria
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Climate change is making this worse. Rainfall across the region is becoming more intense and more frequent, turning already congested streets into flooded obstacles and pushing journey times even further. For a woman in labour, planning that journey – not knowing how long it will take, whether roads will be passable, or whether help will come in time – is a source of real fear and stress.
Yet we currently have no reliable way to measure any of this. No tool exists that can systematically capture how rainfall and flooding delay women's journeys to childbirth care, or the distress those delays cause.
Building on an existing validated tool developed by OnTIME researchers to trace women's journeys to childbirth care, this project aims to fill that gap. We are adapting it to capture something new – the specific ways that weather conditions shape women's care-seeking journeys, cause delays, and create distress. Piloted in Benin City, Nigeria, this adapted tool will, for the first time, allow researchers to systematically document the intersection of climate, mobility, and maternal experience – laying the groundwork for interventions that make urban maternity systems more resilient to a changing climate
Project investigator: Dr Kerry Wong
Project supervisor: Dr Aduragbemi Banke-Thomas
In cities across sub-Saharan Africa, a hospital might be just a few kilometres away, yet still take hours to reach. Traffic congestion, unreliable transport, and fragmented referral systems mean that even in good weather, the journey to childbirth care can be unpredictable, stressful, and potentially life-threatening.
