As part of this portfolio, we focus on three key topics:

• Women’s health service utilisation along the maternal continuum of care in 22 large African cities. We analysed the use of antenatal, childbirth, and postnatal care services and their content, and concluded that few cities achieved good performance across these three services. Most cities showed inconsistent levels of maternal care utilisation and content across the continuum of care. Cotonou and Accra relatively showed the best performance and Nairobi and Ndjamena the worst.

• Levels of perinatal mortality in cities in sub-Saharan Africa are different from rural areas. We examined mortality in 21 countries of Sub-Saharan Africa and looked at Tanzania in particular, because its mortality rate among newborns was higher in urban areas compared to rural.

• The meaning of “urbanicity” in terms of how we understand it in maternal and newborn health research, how we measure it and how it affects the health outcomes of women and their babies. We co-authored a commentary calling for more extensive multisectoral approaches to addressing global urban maternal and perinatal health inequities, which includes case studies from Rotterdam and Kampala.