RESEARCH ARTICLE Successful Community Midwives in Pakistan: An Asset-Based Approach

In response to the low levels of skilled birth attendance in rural Pakistan, the government introduced a new cadre of community midwives (CMWs) in 2006. Assessments to-date have found that these CMWs have yet to emerge as significant providers for a number of sociocultural, geographic and financial reasons. However, a small number of CMWs have managed to establish functional practices in the private sector in conservative, infrastruc-ture-challenged rural contexts. With an objective to highlight “what are the successful CMWs doing right given their context? ” this paper adopts an asset-based approach to explore the experiences of the Pakistani CMWs who have managed to overcome the barri-ers and practice. We drew upon ethnographic data that was collected as part of a larger mixed methods study conducted in 2011–2012 in districts Jhelum and Layyah, Pakistan