No Mother Walks Alone. No Father Left Behind.

Before the sun rises over Kwaluseni, a Mentor Mother is already on her feet. In the peri-urban communities ringing Manzini, peer mentorship is changing how mothers survive pregnancy — and, for the first time, drawing fathers into the story.

At 5:30 in the morning, while much of Kwaluseni is still dark, Gcinaphi Nxumalo is already awake. Before she becomes a Mentor Mother for the day, she is simply a mother: she washes and dresses her own child and gets him ready for daycare. Only then does she turn to the households waiting for her.

It is a small detail, but it explains everything about how this programme works. Gcinaphi is not an outsider arriving with a clipboard. She lives in the same crowded settlement as the women she supports, walks the same narrow paths between the single-room flats, and knows what it costs to raise a child here, where work means the long walk to the Matsapha factories and the nights can be dangerous for a woman alone.

She plans each day the night before. Will it be client visits? House-to-house follow-ups? Supporting a mother through her appointment at the clinic? The answer depends on where the need is greatest, and in these communities the need is rarely in one place.

The work that happens at the door

This is the premise at the heart of the programme run by Siphilile Maternal & Child Health, with support from UNICEF Eswatini: the most effective health educator for a pregnant woman in a peri-urban community is often another woman who has walked the same road. Trained Mentor Mothers, recruited from the very communities they serve, carry support to the doorstep — no appointment required, no transport to find.

When Gcinaphi visits a household, she begins with a simple question: how is the mother coping, in body and in mind? She uses the mother's clinic card as her map, checking antenatal appointments, blood pressure, HIV status and nutrition. She reminds mothers to take the supplements that help a baby grow in the womb, and to eat well, especially when they are on medication. She talks about the things a stretched health system has no time to teach: hygiene, self-care, keeping a clean home, the daily routines that quietly protect a mother and her child.

As a due date nears, the conversation turns practical. Pack the baby clothes. Plan the journey to hospital. "Since ambulances can sometimes delay," she explains, "we encourage them to save money for a taxi in case labour begins unexpectedly." She teaches mothers the signs of labour, because knowing when to leave for the hospital can be the difference between a safe delivery and a tragedy.

And after the baby arrives, she returns. She shows new mothers how to bathe a newborn safely, how to watch for dangerous bleeding, how to care for the umbilical cord until it heals. She checks the baby's skin, eyes and weight. She listens, she guides, she stays.

"Being a Mentor Mother is about walking alongside women through pregnancy, childbirth and early motherhood," Gcinaphi says, "offering care, education and encouragement every step of the way."

A weight too many carry alone

The women she walks beside are carrying a great deal. In the communities around Manzini, poverty runs deep and teenage pregnancy is not the exception but the pattern. Eswatini's adolescent birth rate, at 78 per 1,000 girls, is among the highest in the region. Since 2021, Siphilile has enrolled 323 pregnant mothers aged between 10 and 19, twenty-six of them living with HIV and needing careful support to keep their babies from being infected.

For many young mothers, the journey through pregnancy has always been navigated without enough information, without family support, and without a health system that comes to meet them. They miss antenatal visits because no one has explained why they matter. They struggle with breastfeeding and nutrition, not through carelessness, but for the simple lack of anyone to show them how.

That is the gap the Mentor Mothers step into. Across seven communities in the Manzini Region, thirty-two of them now reach close to nine in ten of their clients in the home itself. Since 2021 the programme has enrolled 8,672 mothers and reached more than 15,000 children under five with health support that protects their first, most fragile years.

The father his father never was

For all its reach, the programme long shared a blind spot with the wider health system: fathers were largely absent from the story. Missing from clinics, from conversations about pregnancy, from the parenting journey altogether. In 2024, Siphilile set out to change that, adding a Mentor Father component to draw men in.

Mcolisi Simelane, a father of five from KaKhoza township in Manzini South, is what that change looks like up close.

He first came to Siphilile in 2015, not as a volunteer but as a man with a problem he did not know how to solve. His partner was reluctant to go to the hospital during her pregnancy, and he had no idea how to help her. What he found there was something he had never encountered before: a space where young fathers could sit together and speak openly about the things men are taught to keep to themselves. The fear. The confusion. The weight of a responsibility no one had ever shown them how to carry.

The programme taught him something simple and, for him, revolutionary — to bond with his child before birth. To speak to the baby. To be present not only in body but in feeling. It did not only change how he fathered his children. It changed how he saw himself.

"Bonding with my unborn children has made me become the father my father never was," he says. "It has brought me closer to my children, and today I feel the love and the bond within my family."

Today the support still comes to his door. A trained Mentor Father volunteer — a man who went through the programme himself — visits Mcolisi at home, sitting with him over a child health card, the way the Mentor Mothers sit with the women they support. It is peer mentorship extended to men: fathers showing other fathers what no one once showed them.

His message reaches past his own gate. "Tell yourself: I'm not just a father, I'm a source — a source of education, love and security within the family."

What sustained investment makes possible

Mcolisi is not a pilot. He is proof of what is possible when men are invited into the conversation — and there are thousands of fathers across Manzini's communities who have never been told that bonding with an unborn child is even possible, let alone important. Reaching them is the next frontier.

The results so far are clear, but the need is not yet met. The settlements Siphilile serves are still home to families for whom a clinic visit, a vaccination, or a bag of nutritious food demands resources and determination that many simply do not have. Thirty-two Mentor Mothers cannot yet reach every door.

For UNICEF and its partners, continued investment in this programme is not a request to begin something new. It is an invitation to sustain something that is already working, and to carry it further — to more households, more fathers, more children, and more communities than the programme can currently reach.

"The Mentor Mothers programme does not build systems at a distance," says Njabuliso Lukhele, Programmes Manager at Siphilile. "It builds relationships at the door."

With that support sustained, the promise on the horizon is a simple one: that every pregnant woman in Eswatini can have a mentor beside her, and every father can discover what it means to be a source of love, education and security for his family.

No mother walking alone. And no father left behind.

The Mentor Mothers and Fathers programme is implemented by Siphilile Maternal & Child Health, with support from UNICEF Eswatini, in collaboration with the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Agriculture.