Research trailblazer at uOttawa leads the first pan-Canadian Black women’s health initiative

Josephine Etowa, PhD, is a social innovation champion and full professor at the uOttawa Faculty of Health Sciences’ School of Nursing. She’s determined to bring about change and tackle persistent health inequities affecting Black communities in Canada. Her goal is to focus on advancing Black women’s health through research initiatives and programs that can have a transformative impact on health policy in Canada.

“We know that ACB women in Canada face significant health disparities due to various social determinants like racial and gender discrimination, and structural inequalities,” explains Professor Etowa, who is also the Canada Research Chair in Advancing Black Women’s Health in Canada. “There is a disproportionate burden of diseases that have impacted them for generations, and they have largely been overlooked by research, practices and health-care policies,” she says.

For example, Black women have historically been diagnosed with HIV seven times more frequently than their white counterparts have. Data from Ontario — which is home to 52% of the Black population, accounting for 3.55% of the Canadian population — has shown Black women make up a disproportionate share of first-time HIV diagnoses among women, at 59% in 2019. For Etowa, who previously held the Ontario HIV Treatment Network Chair in Black Women’s HIV Prevention and Care, such an overrepresentation is due to social and structural factors. These factors converge to increase Black women’s vulnerability by reducing their access to HIV prevention.

Reducing systemic health inequities that affect ACB women in Canada, understanding their unique health needs and improving their health is precisely what is guiding Etowa’s research work. It’s grounded in over 20 years of clinical experienceasa registered nurse, midwife and educator, and in community-based participatory principles.

A true pioneer, Josephine Etowa is the architect of and driving force behind the Black Women’s Health Initiative (BWHI). It launched on June 18, 2024, at the University of Ottawa, with support from senators Wanda Thomas Bernard, Marie-Françoise Mégie and Bernadette Clement. The BWHI aims to establish the first-ever comprehensive 10-year research agenda to address the unique health challenges faced by ACB women in Canada. It promises to foster collaboration in research, capacity-building and policy development to improve ACB women’s health and give them access to better health care.

Led by Etowa’s Collaborative Critical Research for Equity and Transformation in Health (CO-CREATH) Lab, and in collaboration with uOttawa’s Interdisciplinary Centre for Black Health, the BWHI has entered its first phase of implementation. This involves engaging key leaders and stakeholders across Canada in the Sisterhood for Health Equity (SHESpeaks) national conversations. “We have called these conversations the SHESpeaks national conversations, and they are paving the way toward the creation of a black women interdisciplinary network (B-WIN),” says Etowa. 

To ensure that the voices of civil society, stakeholders and academic partners are equally included and to reflect the diverse needs and contexts of Black communities across Canada, senior researchers and community members will jointly lead the B-WIN’s six regional hubs. Anchored around pillars of community engagement, knowledge production, capacity-building and knowledge mobilization, the network will be instrumental in forging meaningful multidisciplinary partnerships.

For example, the Ontario hub is the largest of the six regional hubs. Its co-leaders will be the director of Toronto-based community organization the Black Women’s Institute for Health, a director at the Canadian Mental Health Association’s Ottawa branch and the director of the Institute of African Studies at Carleton University.

Professor Etowa wants to bring together people and organizations who would otherwise work in silos to look at issues in society that affect health, such as education, economics, gender issues and culture. “The ecosystem-mapping expertise from the Black Entrepreneurship Knowledge Hub will be instrumental in mapping out resources for people to get a support system across the country,” she says. “That is why we are including partners from sectors outside the health community in the B-WIN.”

“The overall goal of this initiative is to generate high-quality evidence to identify patterns, structural and systemic obstacles, and models for interventions that can inform health programming, policy, practices and new research to critically improve Black women’s health outcomes in Canada,” explains Etowa. In line with her vision, the BWHI is designed to become a framework for empowerment as well as a tool for knowledge mobilization and advocacy for these communities.

The BWHI’s knowledge production, data management and knowledge dissemination provide critically needed research targeting common health issues among ACB women. This work is key to inform health policy players at multiple levels. Neurodiversity, reproductive health issues, mental health and systemic barriers to accessing necessary health services are just a few topics on the BWHI’s research and policy agenda.

Professor Etowa’s impact and contributions to social innovation policy and public health equity in Canada have earned her the Canadian Public Health Association’s 2024 Ron Draper Health Promotion Award and the Canadian Science Policy Centre’s 2021 Trailblazer Award.

With a $50-million funding track record attesting to her research excellence and impact, she now lends her research expertise to the University of Ottawa’s Office of Public Policy Research and Outreach.

Josephine Etowa’s unwavering commitment to addressing Black health inequities has earned her a leadership role in anti-racist and health equity work. She also holds countless distinguished awards, including Canada’s prestigious King Charles III Coronation Medal, uOttawa’s Community Advocate Award for the Peer Equity Navigator advocacy program and the 2024 Order of Ottawa.