What Does It Take to Weave Indigenous Knowledge into Health Systems?

By Andrea Elanga, Communications Manager at eBASE Africa

Ten takeaways from the 2026 International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples commemoration convened by eBASE Africa in partnership with the National Museum of Cameroon

What does it take to successfully weave Indigenous knowledge into health systems?

This was the question at the centre of a dialogue convened by eBASE Africa at the National Museum of Cameroon in Yaoundé to commemorate the 2026 International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples.

By the end of the conversation, a potential answer was beginning to emerge:

Before Indigenous knowledge can be meaningfully woven into health systems, we need to understand how it is generated, transmitted, practised and changed; preserve the people, languages and environments that sustain it; create ways to examine and strengthen it; protect it from appropriation; and build relationships between knowledge holders, researchers, practitioners and policymakers. But perhaps the most important outcome of the discussion was the recognition that there is no simple answer.

Why this conversation?

The 2026 United Nations theme for the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, “Honouring Indigenous Midwives: Safeguarding Life and Well-being,” provided an opportunity to look beyond the celebration of Indigenous cultures and ask a more difficult question: what happens to Indigenous knowledge when it encounters contemporary health systems?

Across Cameroon, knowledge about health, medicinal plants, childbirth, food, the environment and well-being has been accumulated and transmitted across generations. Some of this knowledge continues to shape how people understand illness and make decisions about care.
Yet much of it remains orally transmitted. Some of the people who hold it are ageing. Medicinal plants and the environments in which they grow are changing or disappearing. Younger generations may no longer recognise plants their grandparents knew intimately. At the same time, questions remain about safety, effectiveness, documentation, ownership, regulation and the relationship between traditional medicine and biomedical care.

The commemoration therefore became a space to listen before prescribing solutions. Anthropologists, traditional medicine practitioners, researchers, people working with communities and members of the public brought different experiences into the room. Rather than producing consensus on every issue, their exchanges revealed where the real questions lie.

Ten things we heard and what they mean

1. Indigenous health knowledge is more than a remedy

One of the clearest lessons from the discussion was that Indigenous medicine cannot be reduced to “this plant treats this condition.”
Participants described systems involving observation, diagnosis, selection of plants, harvesting, preparation, combinations, administration, experience and apprenticeship. In some traditions, cultural and spiritual practices are also inseparable from how healing is understood.
As anthropologist Aurélien Mvesso Nganti observed from his encounters with traditional practitioners, there can be an identifiable logic behind how practitioners assess a person, select a remedy and determine how it should be administered.

What are we learning?

If we document only the remedy, we may preserve the ingredient while losing the knowledge.

2. Different systems of knowledge may ask different questions about health

Medical anthropologist Dr Awah Kum Tchouaffi invited participants to consider health beyond biological pathology. Drawing on the distinction between disease, illness and sickness, he reflected on the biomedical, personal and social dimensions of being unwell.
This opened a wider question for the room: what might health systems miss when they understand health primarily through pathology?

What are we learning?

Engaging Indigenous knowledge may not simply add new treatments to health systems. It may challenge us to think differently about what health, illness, care and recovery mean.

3. Recognition should not mean romanticisation

The conversation was strongly supportive of taking Indigenous knowledge seriously. But participants also raised concerns about unsubstantiated claims and people presenting themselves as traditional practitioners without sufficient knowledge or training.
Traditional medicine practitioners themselves spoke about this challenge.

Respecting a knowledge system does not require accepting every claim made in its name. Questions of safety, effectiveness, competence and accountability remain necessary.

What are we learning?

Epistemic justice should create space for Indigenous knowledge to be heard and examined, not exempt it from questioning.

4. Knowledge is situated in place

Dr Awah also emphasised the importance of context. Indigenous knowledge develops within particular ecological, cultural and social environments.

A medicinal practice developed in Cameroon's forest zone, for example, cannot automatically be assumed to operate identically in the Grassfields or another ecological setting.
Plants differ. Environments differ. Practices and interpretations may differ.

What are we learning?

We should resist turning diverse Indigenous knowledge systems into one homogeneous category called “Indigenous knowledge”.
Good documentation needs to ask: Whose knowledge? From where? Practised by whom? Under what conditions?

5. When an ecosystem disappears, knowledge can disappear with it

The conversation repeatedly returned to medicinal plants.
Participants described how urbanisation, changing land use and the disappearance of community and sacred spaces can make medicinal plants increasingly difficult to find.
Dr Awah connected this discussion to a One Health perspective, reminding the room of the interdependence of human, animal and environmental health.

The implications extend beyond biodiversity. When a plant disappears, communities may also lose its name, its uses, the practices surrounding it and eventually the ability to transmit that knowledge.

What are we learning?

Preserving Indigenous health knowledge may also require preserving the ecological systems that make that knowledge possible.

6. Language is part of the knowledge

A fascinating question emerged around the names of medicinal plants. The same plant may have different names between communities, languages or even neighbouring localities. Participants noted that younger generations may sometimes recognise a plant's name without being able to identify the plant itself.

An audience member therefore asked whether Cameroon needs more systematic approaches to identifying medicinal plants across communities. But standardisation also presents a risk: creating one name should not erase the many Indigenous names through which communities understand a plant.

What are we learning?

Documentation could connect botanical identification, Indigenous and local names, geographic location, uses and associated community knowledge.

Language should be preserved as part of the knowledge, not treated as an inconvenience to be standardised away.

7. Knowledge lives in people

Perhaps one of the most important challenges to the idea of “documentation” came from the discussion about apprenticeship. Participants argued that knowing which bark, root or leaf is used does not necessarily make someone a traditional practitioner.

Knowledge may be accumulated through years of observation, practice and learning alongside an experienced knowledge holder. This creates a difficult preservation question.
We can photograph a plant.
We can record its name.
We can write down a recipe.
But can we document decades of experiential knowledge in the same way?

What are we learning?

Preservation cannot focus exclusively on information. It must also consider knowledge holders and intergenerational transmission.

8. Documentation creates questions of ownership

As the discussion moved towards what organisations such as eBASE Africa could do, another question became unavoidable: If a researcher documents knowledge held by a community, whose knowledge does it become?

Mvesso Nganti was particularly clear on this point: documenting a formula or practice does not make the researcher its creator.

This raises questions about attribution, consent, intellectual property, community ownership, access, benefit-sharing and commercialisation. It also brings the event's theme of epistemic justice into very practical territory.

What are we learning?

Documentation should never become extraction. Preserving Indigenous knowledge must include protecting the relationship between the knowledge and the people who hold it.

9. Recognition requires structures, standards and accountability

Traditional medicine practitioner Dr Foma, founder of Back to Our Roots, called for stronger professional organisation of traditional medicine practitioners. His intervention came with an important tension: practitioners want greater recognition within the health landscape, while also recognising the need to distinguish established practitioners from people making unsupported claims.

Cameroon's Law No. 2024/018 of 23 December 2024 on the organisation and practice of traditional medicine provides an important policy context for this conversation.

Audience members consequently asked what the law means for organisations seeking to document traditional health practices and how research, documentation and professional practice should interact with the emerging regulatory framework.

What are we learning?

Legal recognition is one step. The harder questions concern implementation, standards, professional organisation, research, accountability and protection of knowledge holders and patients.

10. The conversation needs to move closer to policy

Towards the end of the dialogue, one participant offered perhaps the clearest answer to “what next?” Bring communities and policymakers back together. Participants called for existing documentation and knowledge gathered from practitioners and communities to move beyond archives and individual projects into structured conversations with the institutions responsible for health, research, culture and traditional medicine.

There were also proposals for dedicated spaces to conserve medicinal plants, better coordination between organisations documenting Indigenous knowledge, and mechanisms through which existing work can be identified rather than repeatedly duplicated.

What are we learning?

The next stage cannot be undertaken by researchers, communities, practitioners or government alone. It requires a space in which knowledge holders, researchers, anthropologists, health practitioners, policymakers and relevant institutions can interrogate the same questions together.

So, what does it take?

We started with what sounded like a question about integration:

What does it take to successfully weave Indigenous knowledge into health systems?

Three hours of stories, disagreements, questions and experiences complicated that question.
Perhaps we are not yet at the point of asking only how to integrate. First, we need to understand. We need to know what is already there, who holds it, how it was developed, how communities determine what is worth transmitting, what is disappearing and what has already disappeared.

We need to understand what can be documented and what may be lost through documentation.

We need mechanisms for examining claims of safety and effectiveness without assuming that one knowledge system must first become another before it can be taken seriously.

We need to understand what communities want to share, what they want to protect and who should benefit when their knowledge generates value.

And we need to understand what Cameroon's evolving legal and institutional framework makes possible.

Only then can we have a more informed conversation about integration.

From commemoration to inquiry

At eBASE Africa, we see events as opportunities to observe, listen, unlearn, learn and relearn.

This commemoration did exactly that. We did not leave the National Museum of Cameroon with a neat formula for bringing Indigenous knowledge into health systems. We left with something potentially more useful: better questions.

The next step is to document what we heard, continue listening to communities and knowledge holders, engage the relevant institutions and examine the legal, ethical and evidence questions that emerged.

Because preserving Indigenous knowledge is not simply about keeping a record of the past.
It is about asking whose knowledge counts today, who gets to carry it forward, and under what conditions it can help shape the systems of tomorrow.