We’ve just concluded Mother’s Month, a period that Embrace dedicates to moving beyond a single day of celebration and creating space for deeper conversations about motherhood.
Why a month? Because it helps us move beyond celebration and into deeper conversations about the realities of motherhood and reflect more meaningfully on what it takes to truly support maternal wellbeing all year round.
Evidence from the Perinatal Mental Health Project revealed that one in three women in South Africa experienced a mental health condition, such as depression or anxiety, around the time of birth of their baby, occurring even more frequently in some contexts. These rates were among the highest in the world, given South Africa’s extreme inequality. Here, more than 40 million people lived on less than a R100 a day.
Maternal mental health is shaped by social determinants such as economic insecurity, exposure to violence, and importantly, by the presence or absence of supportive relationships and social networks.
When such networks exists, mothers feel supported and are less likely to experience depression after childbirth, according to a longitudinal cohort study published in 2021. This study showed that social connectedness – having people a mother could rely on for emotional reassurance, practical help, advice and belonging – was a protective factor.
However, in the South African context, many women navigate motherhood in difficult socio-economic conditions with fragmented social systems. The Covid-19 pandemic illuminated and intensified these dynamics. Public health measures, including lockdowns and restrictions on movement, disrupted employment, education and formal and informal support systems. Since 2019, maternal health experts had been sounding the alarm about an increase in maternal deaths by suicide during pregnancy and how mothers’ mental health had been compounded by the stressors of the pandemic. Local data showed that deaths from psychiatric/suicide causes, while relatively few, had shown a significant increase.
Social support for mothers
While maternal mental health had started to receive greater policy recognition, most notably through the inclusion of a dedicated chapter on mental health in the National Integrated Maternal and Perinatal Care Guidelines released in 2024; the broader ecosystem of support required to sustain maternal wellbeing remained underdeveloped.
We often think of friendship and social networks as optional extras or nice-to-haves; however, in practice, these social connections are essential care infrastructure for mothers that help to reduce isolation, buffer stress and strengthen resilience in ways that were meaningful to maternal mental health outcomes. This is particularly significant during matrescence (the transition into motherhood) when women are renegotiating their identity and changing roles as well as family and societal expectations. Within this major period of life adjustment, peer networks and mother-communities become spaces where mothers’ experiences are recognised, and knowledge is exchanged (from infant care to navigating health systems and tips for re-entering the workplace). This type of relational scaffolding is especially important where formal support systems were limited, fragmented or inaccessible. In these spaces, NGOs and activists had been playing a major role.
For instance, Embrace is building South Africa’s largest network of mothers, helping to build a community for mothers whilst advocating for issues important to them, alongside other organisations working to improve the living conditions of mothers. Grow Great’s Flourish programme is a national network of pregnancy and parenting groups led by trained peer facilitators. Mamahood South Africa has a network of eight hyperlocal Facebook groups, where members could recycle and share mom and baby items, find job listings and share parenting advice. More recently, celebrity mom Nandi Madida started The Motherhood Network, a digital community that shared unfiltered stories and drove honest discussions about motherhood .
This past month, we introduced a digital campaign highlighting the importance of #MomFriends. It featured conversations with maternal mental health champions and Embrace Network partners from The Perinatal Mental Health Project and The Counselling Hub, as well as Mamandla alumni Qaanita Rossier and Kayla-Tess Pattenden, who explored the connection between friendship, mental health and emotional resilience during motherhood. These conversations served as a powerful reminder that motherhood was never meant to be done in isolation.
Full interviews are available on available on our Facebook page.
Strengthening these networks
Instead of treating informal networks as incidental, we need policies that recognised and resourced them as essential components of maternal care, alongside clinical services. This could include dedicated public funding for community-based perinatal support models and community-led mother and baby groups, alongside clear referral pathways from clinics and community health workers into these peer-networks. It would also require integration into primary healthcare systems to ensure maternal and child health services can formally refer women into trusted community support networks as part of routine antenatal and postnatal care.
Enablers of access and participation are also important, such as state-subsidised childcare for mothers, social protection for pregnant women through a Maternal Support Grant so they had income to pay for transport and buy nutritious food, and state investment in safe, accessible community spaces. Alongside this, government-led digital inclusion initiatives need to recognise the growing role of online peer support, including zero-rating online peer support platforms, where mothers increasingly sought connection, information and emotional support.
So, what did mothers need this Mother’s Day? Real support systems that made it possible to cope, connect and thrive.