A women's health research and evidence programme applying a life-course approach, from adolescence to later life, to the conditions and determinants that disproportionately affect women and girls across Africa.
Menstrual health, HPV prevention, nutrition and school-age wellbeing.
Pregnancy, childbirth and postpartum care, including safe water and hygiene.
Midlife transitions, early detection of cancers and chronic conditions.
Long-term health, access to care and mental wellbeing.
We organise our work into four priority areas. Each one covers conditions that affect women across the life course, and each is shaped by local questions, local researchers and local health systems.
Select a row to see the topics inside each priority. Illustrative guide to where each priority mainly applies across the life course. It shows our research focus, not measured data.
Health research has not studied everyone equally. Women's bodies were long treated as a variation on a male standard, and research in and from Africa has received a fraction of the attention its health burden calls for. Where those two gaps overlap, African women are left with the thinnest evidence of all. This is the gap we created the HER Science Initiative to close.
Almost any unexplained symptom in a woman, from pelvic pain to seizures, could be filed under "hysteria". Distinct chronic conditions went unrecognised and unstudied.
Women living with conditions we now recognise, such as endometriosis, epilepsy or depression, were dismissed, isolated or institutionalised, and their suffering left no scientific record.
Women of childbearing age were largely kept out of early-phase drug trials. Hormones, body weight and metabolism were rarely studied, and medicines were dosed to a male standard.
Women experience more adverse drug reactions than men. Several widely used medicines reached the market with little data on how they behave in female bodies.
Even after women entered trials, results were often pooled, which hid differences between the sexes. Heart research treated the male pattern of heart attack as the standard.
Women with atypical symptoms such as nausea, jaw pain or deep fatigue were more likely to be misdiagnosed and sent home. Heart disease remains a leading cause of death for women.
For decades, much laboratory science relied on male animals and male cell lines. Female biology was left out at the earliest stage of discovery.
Women make up around 80% of people with autoimmune disease, yet diagnosis can take years and many doctors. Delays of 7 to 10 years are widely reported for endometriosis.
Most of the evidence used to guide care was generated elsewhere, in populations, health systems and living conditions that differ from those across Africa. Africa-specific, sex-disaggregated data on women's health is still scarce, and that scarcity is itself the gap.
Clinicians and policymakers are left to apply findings that may not fit, and African women carry the cost of questions that were never asked locally. Researchers on the continent often lack funding, mentorship and pathways to turn their work into policy.
With the Initiative, we build the pathway that is missing for women's health: African researchers generating locally relevant evidence, early-career talent mentored to lead it, and findings explained clearly enough for communities, practitioners and policymakers to use.
Historical and global figures are widely cited in the medical literature and are summarised here for context, not as new findings. Regional figures are approximate and vary by source and year. Maternal mortality: WHO / UN Maternal Mortality Estimation Inter-Agency Group, 2023 estimates, published 2025.
Researchers, institutions and partners are welcome to join the HER Science Initiative.
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