Salome Maswime

Salome Maswime is a South African clinician and health expert. She is an Obstetrician and Gynaecologist and Professor of Global Surgery at the University of Cape Town. In 2017, she was honored with the Trailblazer and Young Achiever Award.

Maswime is an executive member of the South African Perioperative Research Group. She is a member of the International Network of Obstetric Survey Systems. She was a lecturer and Director of the University of the Witwatersrand Obstetrics and Gynaecology Clinical Research Division and an obstetrician at the Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital Academic Hospital.[7] She works with women with high risk pregnancies. Her research considers maternal near miss and mortality. She found that maternal deaths from bleeding during caesarean sections have increased in South Africa. She compared the preparedness of hospitals for surgical complications in caesarean sections in southern Gauteng.

In 2017, she was named by the Mail & Guardian as one of the Top 200 South Africans. Maswime discovered that Africa accounts for 200,000 maternal deaths per year; which is two thirds of all maternal deaths worldwide. She has written for The Conversation about increasing the number of caesarean sections in Africa. She won the Trailblazer and Young Achiever Award from Jacob Zuma in 2017.

In 2018, she launched the South African Clinician Scientists Society. She was awarded a Discovery Foundation Harvard University, Massachusetts General Hospital Fellowship in 2018. Her fellowship allows her to research the causes of stillbirths in HIV-positive people. The fellowship is worth R2.1 million. In 2019 she was appointed as a Professor of Global Surgery at the University of Cape Town.

In 2020, she was announced as one of the World Economic Forum’s Class of 2020 Young Scientists, a group of 25 notable researchers who are “at the forefront of scientific discovery