Reimagining Reproduction: Making babies, making kin and citizens in Africa

Africa has the fastest growing population in the world. At the same time the continent has some of the highest rates of infertility. Most people long to have children for diverse reasons. Those unable to have children seek ways to improve their chances of conceiving.

These may include biomedical interventions, vernacular healing practices, changing or adding partners or making kin through adoption and child circulation.

Yet despite the diversity of lived experiences and practices of reproduction across the continent, most research and interventions into reproductive health in Africa frame it primarily in terms of risk, pathology, mortality, and irresponsibility.

Doing Natality engages a team from four African countries, working across demography, social sciences, medical humanities and science and technology studies, to develop a research agenda that centers the notion of “doing natality”.

We aim to explore practices of doing natality as articulation of love, care, beginning something new and securing better futures in raising children.

We thereby open up a new space to interrogate and explore the usefulness of the notion of “doing natality” as heuristic, theoretical and methodological tool by asking what it means for African women, men and couples to have (or not have) children.