Prof. Kara Hanson

Current Students

Dr. Kenneth Munge, MBChB

Dr. Kenneth Munge, MBChB

PhD Student

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Munge is a public health practitioner with background training and experience as a medical doctor. His interests are in economics of health systems, health systems, and primary care. He has experience in research, analysis and policy engagement in Kenya examining vaccine safety, health financing, strategic purchasing and economic evaluation.
His PhD is examining the capacity of decentralised governments in Kenya to raise the level of public health expenditure without harming their financial well-being (i.e. fiscal space for health) in the context of Kenya’s pursuit of universal health coverage (UHC).
He is co-leading work surveying the distribution of, risk factors for, and cost-effectiveness of diagnostic strategies for hypertension and diabetes; which is also examining the performance and capacity of the Kenyan health systems to deliver interventions to target these diseases through primary care.
He is a member of the African Health Economics and Policy Association, the International Health Economics Association and the John Snow Society.
He is part of the management group of RESYST – Resilient and Responsive Health Systems – a DFID-funded international consortium, that brings together ten African and Asian countries and is also a member of the Kenya Country Core Group for the Joint Learning Network for Universal Health Coverage.

Affiliation(s):

London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, UK

My research has focused primarily on the economics of health systems in low- and middle-income countries. I have done research on hospital sector reforms in Uganda and Zambia, focusing on the implications of two-tier pricing for equity of access to hospital services. I am interested in the role of the private sector in health systems, and in identifying the opportunities and limitations of the private sector in improving the efficiency, quality and responsiveness of health systems.  I work with a DFID funded project on education systems research, contributing insights from the development of health systems research methods.  I am co-Research Director of RESYST – Resilient and Responsive Health Systems , which is a UK-DFID funded research consortium bringing together researchers from South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, Thailand, India, Vietnam and the UK. Our programme includes research on health financing, health workers and governance and leadership in the health sector.

My second area of focus is the economics of malaria control interventions. In particular, I am interested in understanding better how to expand access to interventions that have been shown to be cost-effective. Recent activities in this area include the ACTWatch Project, studying the market for antimalarial medicines and a linked grant from the ESRC Secondary Data Analysis Initiative to estimate the demand for antimalarials; and economic evaluations of a range of interventions addressing malaria in pregnancy; and the Independent Evaluation of the Affordable Medicines Facility-Malaria, which is an innovative financing mechanism for antimalarial drugs.

I am a member of the Centre for Evaluation, the Malaria Centre, and the Centre for Global Noncommunicable Diseases.

In January 2015 I was appointed Associate Dean for Research in the Faculty of Public Health and Policy.