By Dr Naeem Ul Hassan
LONDON — In a Westminster meeting room earlier this year, a Zimbabwean-born midwife sat across the table from senior officials of the British government and was asked, in effect, to help fix one of the most damaging failures in the modern National Health Service.
Black women in the United Kingdom remain nearly three times more likely to die in pregnancy or childbirth than White women, according to the latest MBRRACE-UK national figures, and the gap has refused to close for more than a decade despite repeated government promises. The latest national investigation, led by Baroness Valerie Amos, is examining twelve NHS hospital trusts and the harm caused to hundreds of bereaved families. Its final recommendations, due this year, are expected to define what safe maternity care must look like in Britain for the next decade.
Among the small group of clinicians the investigation has consulted is Sarah Chitongo a name almost no Zimbabwean newspaper has yet carried, despite the fact that she may now be the most influential Zimbabwean working in healthcare in the United Kingdom.
Chitongo was born in Bulawayo and trained as a nurse and then as a midwife in the United Kingdom. She has spent more than twenty years inside British maternity services, including as Acting Deputy Head of Midwifery at Princess Royal University Hospital in Kent, where she established a high dependency unit on a delivery suite to care for women whose pregnancies required intensive monitoring. As a midwifery educator at Middlesex University, she became one of the first clinicians in Britain to bring augmented reality into the training of midwives — work covered internationally by Reuters, Voice of America and the BBC.
In 2018 she became one of only six recipients of the Mary Seacole Award, the most prestigious honour available to a Black or minority ethnic nurse or midwife in the United Kingdom, named for the nineteenth-century Jamaican-Scottish nurse who served on the Crimean battlefields. She is a Fellow of the Royal College of Midwives and a Queen’s Nurse a national designation given to nurses who have demonstrated excellence over a sustained career.
These are credentials. But Chitongo will tell you that credentials were not what changed her life. What changed her life was a prayer.
In May 2025, Chitongo attended a faith-driven gathering in London called Limitless Woman, hosted by the Zimbabwean-born organisational psychologist and author Sarah Garande. At the end of the evening, women were prayed for, by name.
“I walked in tired,” Chitongo says, in an interview earlier this year. “Not the tired of a long week. The tired of twenty years standing in maternity rooms watching things I could not unsee. Something shifted in me that night. It was not a feeling. It was a permission.”
“It was not a feeling. It was a permission.”
In the twelve months that followed, Chitongo founded a charity, built a digital health platform, launched a women’s body care brand, was invited inside 10 Downing Street, was asked to advise the British government on its national Women’s Health Strategy, sat on the reference group co-designing new anti-racism standards being introduced by the Nursing and Midwifery Council that every UK university teaching midwifery must adopt from September, contributed to the recommendations of the Amos investigation, opened a research collaboration with the University of Edinburgh’s EXPPECT centre — the world-leading endometriosis research group joined a research consortium with the President of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, was invited into the BiteLabs Fellowship, and began advising countries on the African continent whose maternal mortality is among the worst on earth.
“It was not impossible,” Chitongo says of the acceleration. “It was assigned.”
Chitongo’s work in the United Kingdom now sits across three institutions she has built. Black Blossom Alliance https://blackblossomalliance.org/ , a community interest company, transforms maternity outcomes for Black women through culturally safe care, professional training, and policy advocacy. It has walked into the British Parliament alongside the established maternal health organisations FivexMore and Equitable Birth to demand structural change.
Vina, the digital health platform she founded and leads as chief executive, is a clinically governed symptom journal for women experiencing chronic pelvic pain, endometriosis, adenomyosis and fibroids. Women in the United Kingdom now wait an average of nine years and four months for an endometriosis diagnosis — a figure cited by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists and debated in the House of Commons in March 2026. For Black women that delay can be longer. Vina lets a woman track ninety days of structured symptoms aligned to NICE clinical guidance NG73 and walk into her appointment with data the consultation cannot dismiss. The platform carries DCB0129 clinical safety certification, has been reviewed by the MHRA, and is registered with the NHS Innovation Service.
Kora Women, the third pillar, is an organic body care brand built for women whose bodies have been historically underserved by the global wellness industry.
Her published writing has begun to enter the mainstream. Her book Reframing Risk, Redesigning Care is now taught across British midwifery and postgraduate programmes. Her new book, Period Pains: Endometriosis, Adenomyosis, Fibroids and the Fight for Better Women’s Healthcare, is published this year.
“We are not building awareness. We are building accountability.”
It is the continental dimension of Chitongo’s work that should most interest Zimbabwean and pan-African readers.
She is being increasingly called upon by African countries with the highest maternal mortality rates in the world. In sub-Saharan Africa, the lifetime risk of a woman dying in childbirth is one in forty, compared with one in 4,800 in the United Kingdom and one in 7,800 in the wealthiest economies of the world. The numbers in some countries on the continent are not three times worse than the UK, but thirty or forty times worse.
“We have spent decades importing Western maternity models into African systems and then expressing surprise when they break,” Chitongo says. “African maternity care has been designed in rooms that do not contain African women. That is what I am building toward changing.”
Her argument is structural. The same clinical infrastructure that makes Vina work in Lewisham, she says, can be adapted for women in Harare, Lusaka, Lilongwe or Lagos. The culturally safe training she is co-designing for the British nursing regulator can be adapted for ministries of health across the continent. And the diaspora Zimbabwean, Nigerian, Ghanaian, Kenyan and Cameroonian women working in British, Canadian and American clinical systems are, in her words, the bridge.
“This is not aid. This is infrastructure. Built by African women, for African women.”
It is a position that places Chitongo philosophically alongside the most ambitious African philanthropists of her generation including the work of the Higherlife Foundation, whose investment in Zimbabwean maternal and neonatal health has trained around 4,000 frontline health workers and equipped the hospitals that handle the majority of complicated births in Zimbabwe.
Asked what she would say to a young Zimbabwean girl reading this in Bulawayo or Harare or Lusaka tonight, Chitongo does not hesitate.
“If the dream you are carrying feels too big for the woman holding it, that is how you know it is yours. If it fits comfortably inside who you currently are, it is not a dream. It is a hobby. The dream that is yours is the one that scares you in the morning and keeps you up at night and makes you wonder if God got the wrong woman.”
She pauses.
“He did not get the wrong woman.”
Sarah Chitongo is the founder of Black Blossom Alliance and founder and chief executive of Vina. She returns to the Limitless Woman platform in London on 16 May. Her book Period Pains: Endometriosis, Adenomyosis, Fibroids and the Fight for Better Women’s Healthcare is published this year.
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