Short Abstract

This panel examines how indigenous knowledge and community-based information systems shape everyday health practices in Africa, challenging the dominance of biomedical knowledge and highlighting local ways of knowing, sharing, interpreting and acting on health information.

Long Abstract

Health knowledge in Africa is produced and circulated through diverse systems that extend beyond formal clinics and biomedical institutions. Families, elders, traditional healers, and community networks, all shape how people obtain, interpret, validate and act upon health information. Yet these everyday knowledge practices often remain marginal within dominant health-information frameworks. This panel, “Beyond the Clinic: Indigenous Knowledge, Health Information and Everyday Health Practices in Africa,” explores how African communities produce, preserve, circulate and use health knowledge in everyday life. It approaches indigenous knowledge not simply as a repository of traditional practices, but as a dynamic information system through which communities understand illness, prevention, healing, wellbeing and health risks. Particular attention is given to oral traditions, local languages, community memory, intergenerational transmission and social networks as mechanisms for communicating health knowledge. The panel also examines encounters between indigenous and biomedical knowledge, including questions of trust, authority, evidence, accessibility and legitimacy. Contributions may explore how digital technologies and social media are reshaping the circulation of indigenous and biomedical health information, and the implications for health literacy, misinformation, healthcare decision-making and community wellbeing. Bringing together perspectives from different African contexts and disciplinary traditions, the panel seeks to foreground locally grounded forms of health knowledge and examine how they interact with formal health systems and emerging information environments. It asks whose knowledge is recognized as legitimate in defining health, illness and appropriate care, while highlighting the diversity of African ways of knowing and communicating health.

Keywords: Indigenous knowledge; Health information; Health practices; African epistemologies.

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