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Muli bwanji? In Malawi you hardly ever have an exchange without asking the other person how they are, and you can be sure you’ll always be asked back. The country is known as “The Warm Heart of Africa,” and all who visit have the opportunity to confirm this statement. Since 1990, it has hosted the UNC Project-Malawi (UNCPM), a collaboration between UNC Chapel Hill and the Malawi Ministry of Health. It is located on the campus of Kamuzu Central Hospital in the capital city of Lilongwe. The project’s mission is to identify innovative, culturally acceptable, and affordable methods to improve the health of the people of Malawi, through research, capacity building, and care. The scope of activities has diversified since then.

Before I moved to North Carolina and started the MPH program in the department of Health Behavior, I lived in Lilongwe from 2013 to 2016, working for the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In 2015, I met my wife when she was working at UNC Project-Malawi and because of her research in pediatric oncology we have kept in contact with the project since we moved. This summer I was fortunate enough to join the project to work on a research study called, “Mother Infant Retention-Promoting Mother Infant Retention along the HIV Care Continuum: A Comparative Effectiveness Evaluation of Three Models for Community Facility Linkage.” The study’s goal is to characterize widely adopted community-facility linkage models and assess the impact on mother-infant pair care retention and the Prevention of Maternal-to-Child Transmission (PMTCT) of HIV under “real world” conditions in Malawi.

My participation in the study involves a literature review describing issues of HIV linkage to care during the Universal Test and Treat area in Sub-Sharan Africa and other high-burden settings. The review should be published in a special supplement about linkage to care in the AIDS and Behaviour journal, and I will be included as one of the co-authors of the article. For the past week, I have been accompanying the study team during their last data collection activities in two sites near Lilongwe, before they move to other sites in the north of the country. For the rest of my practicum I will be working with an epidemiologist to conduct an interim data analysis and the study’s coordinator to prepare an interim report for the study funder, USAID/PEPFAR, and for key Malawian policymakers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

-Rigo

 

My name is Kirsten Miner and I’m a first year MPH student in the Maternal and Child Health department. I’m passionate about reproductive health and family planning, particularly for those women who live at the “last mile” – women who live and work in rural areas for whom access to health care is a challenge. I’m interested in learning about novel ways the global health community is tackling this challenge, and I couldn’t have found a better internship to explore this interest than my current practicum: the Sayana® Press project under PATH Uganda!

Sayana®  Press is an all-in-one injectable contraceptive offering three months of pregnancy prevention. It is similar to Depo-Provera, another injectable contraceptive that is widely popular across Sub-Saharan Africa. However, Sayana® Press is unique in that it doesn’t require a trained health professional to administer it. Lay health workers such as Community Health Workers, and even women themselves, are qualified to inject with appropriate training. This makes Sayana®   Press an excellent solution for women living in rural areas: they can access training through their health center and then take home enough units to use for up to a full calendar year, preventing frequent returns to the clinic to access contraceptive services.

For my practicum, I joined PATH’s Advancing Contraceptive Options project which is the major driver for Sayana®   Press introduction in Uganda and has been training Ugandan women in four districts to self-inject with the drug. This week (my first week on the project!) the team launched Phase I of their evaluation of self-injection in order to determine best practices and cost-efficacy. I was able to join the evaluation team on a site visit to Oyam District in northern Uganda to support the launch and learn the ins and outs of the evaluation process.

 

I’m excited to continue participating in the evaluation and learning about the project!

-Kirsten

Meet our summer 2018 bloggers! They are Master of Public Health students studying health behavior, maternal and child health, and public health leadership.

• Edith Amponsah will be working with MAZA
• Rodrigo Costa Liao will be working with UNC Project-Malawi
• Karla Jimenez-Magdaleno will be working with the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research
• Kirsten Miner will be working with PATH
• Fanny Njie will be working with the United Nations Population Fund
• Jess Simons will be working with Shifra