(CKOM News/file photo)

By CKOM News

Health

U of S leading international project to help evaluate maternal health of Indigenous women

Sep 20, 2025 | 6:01 PM

A professor at the University of Saskatchewan is leading an international project aiming to create a new tool in order to evaluate the maternal health of Indigenous women in rural parts of Canada and east Africa.

The five-year project is being led by Dr. Corinne Schuster-Wallace, a professor in the university’s department of geography and planning and executive director of the Global Institute for Water Security. She said the project explores the intersection of water and environment with social and cultural systems for women and mothers in communities around the world.

The project recently received more than $1.3 million in funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.

“Livelihood, housing, food security, safety – you can’t get there without thinking about water and local water security,” Schuster-Wallace said in a statement.

The project’s team, which includes members from countries like Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, will conduct research in Indigenous communities in rural areas of both Canada and Africa in order to develop a tool that can be used by communities or local governments to assess the community’s maternal well-being.

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“By using indicators developed within communities, Schuster-Wallace and her team hope their tool can help show communities where there are needs affecting maternal well-being that can be filled to improve community health and well-being, especially for women, girls and their babies,” the university explained in a statement.

“It’s about water and nutrition, water and sanitation, water and livelihoods,” Schuster-Wallace added. “We started looking at maternal health outside of the health care system and realized there’s a broader context of maternal well-being.”

Schuster-Wallace said the team will be looking at social and environmental determinants of health from the perspectives of women, men, communities and health professionals, hoping to find core similarities that will allow for the creation of a flexible evaluation tool.

Ultimately, the goal is that the tool can be used to help demonstrate where the greatest needs are in specific communities, in order to improve health and well-being, especially for women, girls, mothers and their babies.