Prof. Edwine Barasa

Current Mentees

Dr. Jacquie Narosto Oliwa, MBChB

Dr. Jacquie Narosto Oliwa, MBChB

PhD Student

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Jacquie is a paediatrician and clinical epidemiologist, currently pursuing her PhD studies at the Academic Medical Centre of the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Her interests lie in health systems research, specifically use of implementation science theories to improve quality of care to sick children.  Her PhD work involves understanding and improving case detection of tuberculosis (TB) in children, including use of new and emerging diagnostic tests.

Her past research work involved being an investigator on a large multi-site clinical trial on treatment of severe pneumonia in children and an observational study on optimising diagnosis of TB in children-both contributed to policy change in Kenya. She was also the lead in a project implementing use of donated medical equipment and best clinical practice guidelines to improve quality of care in maternal, new-born and child health in several hospitals in rural Kenya.

She serves on the Paediatric TB Technical Working Group, advising the Kenya National TB Programme on matters pertaining to childhood TB. She was involved in updating the Paediatric TB guidelines, developing a training curriculum and delivering training to health care workers in Kenya. She is also a member of the Union of Lung Health and the WHO Child TB subgroup-involved in global child TB policies.

Edwine is the director of the Nairobi Programme of the KEMRI-Wellcome Trust Research Programme and also heads the Programme’s Health Economics Research Unit (HERU). Edwine is also a Visiting Professor of Health Economics at the University of Oxford. He has a PhD in health economics (University of Cape Town), a masters degree in health economics (University of Cape Town), and a bachelors degree in Pharmacy (University of Nairobi). Edwine’s research interests include health financing; equity and efficiency analysis in healthcare; economic evaluation of healthcare interventions; measuring health systems’ performance; and health system governance. Edwine has several years of experience of practice, advisory, and conducting health economics and financing research in Kenya and in the broader Sub-Saharan African region. He provides health financing advisory to the Kenya Ministry of Health with his latest roles including appointments by the Minister of Health to the taskforce for the reform of the National Hospital Insurance Fund (NHIF) and Kenya Health Benefits Advisory Panel. At the regional level, his latest appointments include as a member of the advisory board of the Africa CDC’s Health Economic Unit, and as co-chair of the Africa Universal Health Coverage Commission. He also provides health financing technical advisory support to several international development organizations, including the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), focusing on the broader Sub-Saharan African region including Kenya, Ghana, Somalia, Malawi, Madagascar, Uganda, Rwanda, Sudan, South Sudan, Mozambique, and Egypt.