Nondumiso Satiso Vilane

Her interest in fatherhood began with a frustration. Working in maternal and child health, she saw programme after programme designed to improve the lives of young people, mothers and children. Yet progress was often slower than it should have been. So she asked a simple question: what might we be missing?

The answer she kept coming back to was fathers. The more she looked, the clearer it became how much fathers shape the health, safety and development of their children and partners, and how often they had been left out of the conversation. That curiosity became a research interest, and the research interest became a calling.

Today she works to make room for fathers as active, informed and emotionally present partners in family life. She explores these ideas in her book, More Than a Provider, and through her doctoral research at the University of the Witwatersrand.

Her vision reaches beyond research. Through AdvoCare for Empowered Families (ACEF), an initiative she is building, she hopes to help families become informed, supported and empowered to thrive, with a focus on father involvement from before pregnancy through early childhood. Its guiding message is simple: we are building families on purpose.