IID in Rwanda for kickoff meeting exploring malaria analytics
Harvard Chan community members and international collaborators gathered in Kigali, Rwanda for a kickoff meeting: math vs. malaria.
Specifically, IID Professor Abdisalan Noor and Carmen Mejia, executive director of IID’s Defeating Malaria Initiative, attended “Strengthening Public Health Analytics in Africa,” where the Exemplars in Global Health (EGH) program discussed their study on countries that successfully implemented Malaria Subnational Tailoring (SNT).
Harvard Chan Policy analysts Christina Matta and Anna Makido from the Department of Global Health and Population and country partners from Laos, Mozambique, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Burkina Faso, also participated.
The World Health Organization (WHO) defines SNT as “…the use of local data and contextual information to determine the appropriate mix of interventions and strategies for a given area to achieve optimum impact on transmission and burden of disease at the strategic level or within a specific resource envelope.”
On the “Malaria Subnational Tailoring” page of their website, EGH expands on how subnational areas are stratified by arranging different factors, like malaria epidemiology, entomology, and climate, into layers, which are then used to identify regionally specific solutions and create mathematical models to analyze various scenarios, including distinct intervention combinations for subnational locations. The options are prioritized on the criteria of maximum impact as well as what resources are available.
EGH is an organization that studies exactly what it’s named after: examples of health excellence around the world. Moreover, they provide public health leaders with evidence-based insights applicable to individualized locations and circumstances.
“The goal of the SNT Exemplars study is to examine barriers and facilitators to planning, implementing, and sustaining the SNT of malaria interventions to optimize impact on transmission and burden of disease,” EGH states on their “Malaria Subnational Tailoring” page. The global coalition focuses on the knowledge they can learn and share with other countries from those with notable SNT establishment and outcomes.
EGH describes how they approach their research by:
- Investigating the processes that each study country undertook to operationalize SNT to inform malaria strategy and resource allocation and the barriers and facilitators to implementation.
- Framing which best practices and core capacities enable each step of SNT to be successfully operationalized across study countries.
- Investigating the key decisions that were made because of the SNT as positive deviance from business as usual, the level of implementation of these decisions, and their impact nationally or sub-nationally.
A blend of professionals comprises EGH—researchers, academics, experts, funders, country stakeholders, and implementers—all coming together to support their mission of delivering what they’ve learned from positive global health outliers to public health decision-makers, so they can make informed choices regarding resources and policy.
Between malaria control strategy discussions, Prof. Noor, Carmen, Carmen, and the other attendees soaked up the art, delicious food, and culture in Rwanda.
