Relational contexts and men’s responsibilities informing men’s participation in antenatal care in rural sub-Saharan Africa: A scoping review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Men's participation is critical to improving antenatal care (ANC) and maternal and child health outcomes in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), the region where these outcomes are the worst globally. Many current studies employ narrow, biomedical definitions that focus on men's direct involvement in ANC. Little is known about how fatherhood and men's participation in ANC are conceived or experienced in specific sociocultural contexts in SSA. We aimed to synthesize the existing scientific literature on the relational contexts that shape fatherhood and men's participation in ANC, and men's specific responsibilities within those contexts in rural SSA. Following Arksey and O'Malley's classical methodology, we searched ten electronic databases (African Index Medicus, Africa Journals Online, CINAHL, Cochrane Library, EMBASE, MEDLINE/PubMed, PsycINFO, Sociology Collection, Social Sciences Abstract, and Social Sciences Citation Index) for peer-reviewed articles published from January 1st, 2000, to October 31st, 2024. Articles were included if they examined fatherhood and men's participation in ANC in rural SSA, systematically analyzed primary or secondary data, and were written in any language. Seventy-seven articles reporting 58 qualitative, 6 quantitative, and 13 mixed-methods studies spanning 15 countries in SSA were included in this review. We identified ten main themes that addressed our review's objective. Two themes depicted relational contexts that shape fatherhood experiences and men's participation in ANC in rural SSA: (1) familial and communal collaboration, and (2) gendered and culturally-defined role structures. Eight themes described men's specific responsibilities in ANC within the relational contexts identified above: (3) family leaders, (4) decision-makers, (5) providers, (6) protectors, (7) advocates, (8) advisors, (9) nurturers, and (10) helpers. The findings of this review highlight contextually-valid and socioculturally-meaningful experiences that broaden understandings of fatherhood and men's participation in ANC in rural SSA. Future studies can employ Afrocentric approaches to capture often-marginalized perspectives.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.030 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".