By most widely accepted public health metrics, women’s health and healthcare in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is significantly stunted compared to those of developed countries. While it's difficult to draw practical conclusions from such a generalization, certain trends can certainly be useful in our analysis. Life expectancy for the former hovers around 60-65 years old (and has since 2010), compared to 82 years old in the latter (1). 99% of global yearly maternal deaths can be accounted for by “developing” nations (2). According to a 2021 investigation, women in SSA experience significant burdens across three facets: Neglected Tropical Diseases, Non-Communicable Diseases, and poor reproductive health outcomes (3). 

From a nutrition standpoint, sub-Saharan African women face significant challenges. An in-depth exploration of the issue in 1997 revealed a wide array of interacting factors that contribute to region-wide malnutrition. These factors included, but were not limited to, limited availability of/access to food resources, lack of control over resource allocations at the household level; traditional feeding practices that limit women’s consumption of nutritional food, heavy physical labor, the demands of frequent cycles of pregnancy and lactation; a high burden of infections, and limited access to preventive or curative care (4). These issues seem to be present today; in the African region as a whole, women are more likely to die from nutritional deficiencies, and most anemic women in the world (48-57%) live in Africa (5). 

Such striking trends suggest multiple systematic barriers to sub-Saharan African women’s health. But to better appreciate local intricacies and develop actionable solutions, we have to increase our granularity.