Maternity-Kenya - Maternity Spaces and Integral Human Development. Healthy Settings in Maternal-Child Health Centers in Kenya. A pilot study

The research, funded by Kellogg Institute for International Studies and DIDA, focuses on maternity environment and its impact on users' health. Healthy setting is known to influence childbirth and health outcomes for women and children. The birth environment supports the achievement of positive outcomes by influencing the experiences and perceptions of users. More is yet to be discovered on how environments support interpersonal relationships, dignity, and humanization in a childbirth setting and health outcomes. The proposal will investigate the relations between maternity spaces and integral human development to understand how the environment of maternity places affects user's dignity, aesthetic perception, human relationships and, consequently, health outcomes. It focuses on the environment variables contributing to the integral human development of the mothers' and babies' health in the context of developing countries by evaluating the barriers and facilitators of birth spaces in the Maternal-Child Health Centers in Nairobi, Kenya. The research is interdisciplinary involving investigators from Architecture, Health Science and Social Science.

Year:

2020 - 2021

Principal Investigator:

Vania Oka-Smith

Co-PI:

John Onyango

Paul Perrin

Nicoletta Setola

Laura Iannuzzi

Partnership: 

Kellogg Institute for International Studies - University of Notre Dame, USA

TESIS - DIDA - University of Florence, IT

University of Bournemouth, UK

Brother Andre Medical Center, Kenya

Research group:

Sabrina Borgianni

Nicoletta Setola