Outside a zinc-roofed shack on the fringes of Nigeria’s capital, Abuja, Dada Nguru, a self-taught midwife, hangs a large sugar sack that has been ripped open out to dry. Earlier that day, she had laid a woman on it as she delivered her baby boy.

Hours later, a saline bag still hangs from the small open window, the only source of light in the cramped single room that is heady with the smell of sweat.

Nguru’s children sleep in this room, the same room that the women come to give birth in. For more than a year, this ramshackle building in the suburb of Kabusa has been their home – and the midwife’s delivery room.

Her one-year-old son, Muhammadu, nursing at her breast beneath the folds of her flowing red abaya, was still in her belly when she fled her home in the town of Gwoza, in the northeastern state of Borno, and arrived here.