Eggspressions: Consent is belonging, belonging is health

I sat in my Johannesburg garden on purpose to write this final September piece, timed to the World Health Organisation’s spotlight on sexual and reproductive health. The setting wasn’t incidental. A few mornings earlier, during a barefoot grounding walk — a practice I carried home from the University of Massachusetts Medical School’s Center for Mindfulness — I was stopped in my tracks by two birds. Wings raised, voices sharp at sunrise, they blocked my path toward the lemon tree. I told them, twice, that I meant no harm. They didn’t care what I meant. They cared what I did next.

I had every sense of entitlement to that garden — it was mine, after all. But I turned around. Lemons are plentiful; another day would do. Only later did I understand why: two eggs, laid in the open beneath the tree, were the reason for that fierce, tiny resistance. The birds weren’t rejecting me. They were protecting what was theirs, and they needed me to hear “no” as a complete sentence, not a negotiation.

That moment holds the whole thesis: consent is belonging. To be granted a boundary — to have it respected without argument — is to be told your existence matters enough to be protected. And belonging, in turn, is health. Psychologically, physically, socially. The two cannot be separated.

This is where sexual and reproductive health stops being a clinical category and becomes a question of dignity. A mother’s right to safe delivery, a girl’s right to her own body, a woman’s right to choose — these aren’t policy line items. They are, like the eggs under my lemon tree, expressions of a basic claim: this life belongs, and therefore it must be protected.

Days after that garden encounter, I watched Ghana’s President John Mahama open the 81st UN General Assembly not with policy, but with lineage — naming his parents, his languages, the cultures at whose crossroads he was raised. His argument was that belonging anchors dignity, and that no life is worth less because of the language it speaks, the faith it professes, or the land of its birth. He was describing, in geopolitical terms, the same psychology at play in my garden: entitlement means nothing without consent, and dignity requires that boundaries be honoured, not merely tolerated.

Mahama pushed further, into territory that speaks directly to business. He noted that developing nations borrow at interest rates up to eight times higher than industrialised ones, and that African and Caribbean governments rebuilding from climate disasters they didn’t cause are forced into a brutal choice: service debt or serve their people. This is where flourishing gets starved at the root. Health budgets — especially reproductive and maternal health, chronically underfunded even in stable economies — are the first casualties when fiscal space collapses under repayment pressure.

There is a psychological cost here too, one business leaders underestimate. Flourishing — the kind organisational psychologists describe as thriving beyond mere survival — requires felt safety. A workforce, a community, or a nation operating from scarcity and unmet boundaries cannot flourish; it can only cope. The same nervous-system logic that made two birds fight for their unhatched eggs applies to economies stripped of the room to invest in their people’s health. Scarcity forecloses flourishing. Belonging is what restores it.

This is, ultimately, a business case as much as a health one. Companies and economies that build cultures of genuine consent — psychological safety, respected boundaries, autonomy honoured rather than merely permitted — see it return as trust, retention, and resilience. The same holds at the level of nations: reparatory justice, fairer financing, and reproductive health investment are not charity. They are the infrastructure for flourishing.

The lemons were still there the next day. What mattered was that I listened before I reached for them.

Four calls to action, as this WHO-themed month closes:

1. Fund reproductive health as infrastructure, not an afterthought. Governments and businesses alike should protect maternal and adolescent health budgets from the first cuts that come when fiscal pressure hits.

1. Back fairer financing for the Global South. 

Support calls — including Ghana’s — for concessional lending terms that free up national budgets to invest in health and human capital rather than debt servicing.

1. Build psychological safety into organisational culture. 

Leaders should treat consent and boundary-respect not as HR policy, but as the foundation of a workforce that can actually flourish rather than merely cope.

1. Practice consent as a daily discipline, not an abstraction. 

In business, health policy, and personal life, model the same respect for boundaries the birds demanded of me — turning around when told to, without needing the reason first.

Consent is belonging. Belonging is health. And flourishing — for a person, a business, or a nation — only ever grows from ground where both are honoured.

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Joshua Awesome

Dr. Joshua Awesome is a Coaching Psychologist/Executive and Business Performance Coach who has supported over 100,000 professionals across Africa and the globe. He can be reached via: joshua@africainmind.org