“Guilty until Proven Innocent”: The Politics of Maternal Mortality Indicators in Global Health

In this seminar, Katerini Storeng will show how and why the maternal mortality ratio – the MMR – has emerged as a major global health indicator with huge political significance, despite intractable measurement challenges. Based on ethnographic research within international expert communities, she will describe how and why internationally leading epidemiologists have gradually skewed their attention towards the production of globally comparable MMR estimates at the expense of developing locally relevant metrics and strengthening national health intervention systems. She will explain how such unintended effects result from measurement of experts’ attempts to respond to the exigencies of global health politics, notably donor-driven demands for administrative oversight and accountability and intense issue-specific competition for funding and political priority.

Katerini Storeng is an Associate Professor in global health at the Centre for Development and Environment at the University of Oslo.

This event is part of the joint lecture series "Global Health and the Politics of Knowledge". It is organized by the WZB Junior Research Groups “Global Humanitarian Medicine” and “Governance for Global Health”.

The event will be held in English with no translation into German.