Kwataine's efforts were boosted with a 2012 initiative by Malawi's president, Joyce Banda, who sought to trigger behavioral change in the country by working through its 20,000 village chiefs.

"We are pleading with traditional leaders to do their rightful role," he said. "We need to make sure that chiefs come up with laws to bar women from delivering not in a facility."

Giving birth at home, rather than a clinic, falls into a category known as "harmful traditional practices" -- social mores that have been instilled over centuries and continue to be carried out in some regions despite their danger to health. It also includes other, arguably more detrimental, traditions such as child marriage and female genital mutilation (FGM).

The taboo and misinformation surrounding these customs has made them particularly intractable. Despite reams of evidence that early marriage stymies economic development and worsens female health, an estimated 13 million girls each year are married before they turn 18. And while villages and towns around the world have gradually renounced the practice, advocacy groups estimate that 8,000 girls per day are subject to FGM, in which a young girl's clitoris is partly or completely sliced off for purity and aesthetic reasons. If the victim survives the unsanitary procedure, it can make sex painful for the rest of her life and lead to major pelvic diseases.

These traditions have also proven frustratingly difficult to resolve through legal means -- for example, half of all marriages in India occur when the bride is younger than 18, which is the legal marrying age.

Traditional male leaders are typically the ones who protect ancestral ways, so they may not seem like natural vanguards of change. But across the developing world, increasingly more and more tribal chiefs and other leaders are becoming essential to ending harmful practices -- in large part because of how central they are to the village's life and beliefs. To improve the lives of women, some aid organizations are finding, you must first change the minds of the men in charge.

Traditional leaders are "the ones who set the laws in their communities or the social norms," said Lakshmi Sundaram, the global coordinator for Girls Not Brides, a group that works to combat child marriage. "Quite often, even if the parents of a girl don't want to marry her off, they wouldn't dare go against the prevailing norm within that community."

According to Gerry Mackie, co-director of the Center on Global Justice at the University of San Diego, the attempt to modify social norms, in general, is somewhat of a pivot for the health advocacy community, which has only recently shifted from individual-based actions (vaccinations, hand-washing) to societal ones (genital cutting and the like).

"Let's back up 50 years. After World War II, global development programs started taking off, and the first big efforts are in public health. Vaccinations, water, cleanup, and getting rural health clinics, that kind of thing. The rule of thumb [for whom to target with these efforts] was to say, 'What is the population at risk?'"