Find out why Angela Doyinsola Aina is on TIME’s 2026 Closers list.
For nearly two decades, public health practitioner Angela Doyinsola Aina has worked to reform the systems that contribute to Black women in America dying from pregnancy-related causes at ratesthan white women—a disparity that persists regardless of education or income level.
The culprit, the Atlanta native makes clear, isn't individual bad actors, but something far more insidious: structural racism embedded in the American health care system. Aina, 42, is the Executive Director and co-founder of the Black Mamas Matter Alliance, a national network of Black women-led organizations working across the spectrum of perinatal and reproductive health care. Since its founding in November 2016, BMMA has supported the workforce of nurses, doulas, midwives, and physicians who provide care to Black mothers and birthing people. From that vantage point, Aina has witnessed how systemic failures manifest in personal tragedies."It's not just the one-time individual situation," Aina explains, citing recent incidents in which Black women were allegedly refused medical treatment while in active labor. In one case, motherfrom Franciscan Health Crown Point Hospital in Indiana by a nurse who said she wasn’t far enough along, only to give birth on the side of the road. She returned to the hospital a few days later due to post-birth complications. Following public reporting and backlash, Franciscan Health terminated both the nurse and physician involved in Wells’ case and implemented changes to its labor-and-delivery protocols.as barriers to structural change."It's very systemic in the ways health care is provided in this country the ways we value maternal healthcare," she says. Aina's path to this work began when she was an undergraduate at Georgia State University, where she realized she wanted to focus on women’s health but decided against a traditional medical route. Instead, she went on to earn a Master’s in Public Health from the Morehouse School of Medicine and amassed years of public health experience, working for community organizations, state health departments, academic institutions, and the CDC. Throughout her career, volunteering with grassroots reproductive justice organizations and African immigrant-serving groups in Atlanta, Aina noticed a pattern: Black women consistently developed innovative solutions to address community health needs, but rarely received the investment or resources to sustain them."We always come up with the solutions and innovation," she says,"but we're never fully equipped with the investment and proper resources to actually do the work." in 2016. Aina describes its framework as simple but revolutionary:"Trust Black women, listen to Black women, and most importantly, invest in Black women." Over the course of a decade of scholarship and organizing, BMMA hasbirth centers, wraparound service programs , and reproductive justice clinics. “ These different types of models of community-based care genuinely what's needed to address these issues,” she says. “But they need to be funded, sustained, and valued.”, and developed research methodologies rooted in treating study participants as collaborators rather than subjects. The Alliance is also a key force behind the—a series of federal and state bills addressing maternal mortality through investments in social determinants of health, expanding Medicaid coverage, diversifying the perinatal workforce, and strengthening data collection and quality improvement programs., Aina is doubling down on community-building and supporting the health care workers on the front lines. BMMA’s theme for this year’sFor Aina, closing the equity gap isn't just about improving statistics; it's about recognizing that Black women have always known how to care for their communities. “When we center the people most impacted by these issues,” she says, “it has a positive effect on everybody."
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