Waiting in a Place of Impossible Demands: Surveillance-Care in a Tanzanian Maternity Waiting Home

Today in rural Tanzania, nurses instruct pregnant women to go to maternity waiting homes (MWH), spaces of surveillance-care, long before due dates. Envisioned as a place for risk in policies of global safe motherhood, ethnography shows how the MWH becomes a place of risk to pregnant women and nurses. Negotiations at the MWH show how surveillance-care can be used to control and reinforce hierarchies - inadvertently creating risk - but also, in surprising ways, mitigate risk by insisting on other forms of care. Surveillance-care is both a tool of governance and a means to assess and bring about kinship and care.