Dr. Jane Chuma

Affiliation(s):

KEMRI – Wellcome Trust, Kenya

Jane completed a PhD in health economics in 2005 from the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Her research interests include evaluating different health financing mechanisms for universal coverage including health insurance and tax funding; equity in access to health care services and health related interventions and; the relationship between ill health and poverty. Her training fellowship- funded by the Wellcome Trust – explores the feasibility of using health insurance mechanisms to address existing inequities in the Kenyan health system. Jane works closely with the ministries of health to ensure that results from this work inform the development of the Kenyan health financing strategy and the design of a national health insurance scheme. Beyond research, Jane has a keen interest in capacity building for Health Economics in Africa and is one of the founder members of the Masters in Health Economics programme at the University of Nairobi.

Dr. Edwine Barasa

Edwine is a health economist, and currently heads the health economics research unit (HERU), and co-leads for the health systems research theme of the KEMRI-Wellcome Trust Research Programme, Kenya. He has over 10 years practice and research experience in health economics and systems, with research interests in health financing, equity, poverty, efficiency, economic evaluation of healthcare interventions, measuring health systems performance, priority setting and resource allocation, and health system governance. Edwine was awarded a Wellcome Trust Masters Fellowship enabling him to obtain a Masters Degree in Health Economics from the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and subsequently, a PhD in Health Economics in 2015 from the same University. In 2015, Edwine was awarded a 3 Wellcome-Trust Research Training fellowship in public health and tropical medicine to conduct research that examines the equity and pro-poorness of Universal Health Coverage (UHC) reforms in Kenya. Before joining the KEMRI-Wellcome Trust Research Programme, Edwine worked as a clinical pharmacist for 2 years in both the public and private sectors.

Prof. John Ataguba

Affiliation(s):

School of Public Health & Family Medicine, University of Capetown

Prof. James Kahindi

Email : jkahindi@pu.ac.ke

Prof. Mike English

Affiliations:

KEMRI – Wellcome Trust

Nuffield Department of Medicine, Oxford University

Mike worked in Kilifi from 1992 on malaria, in the early years of the ‘Kilifi’ programme, and returned to the UK in 1996 to complete specialist training as a General Paediatrician in 1998. He returned to Kilifi in 1999 to rejoin the programme and work on neonatal illnesses as part of a Wellcome Trust Career Development Fellowship while also working as a paediatrician in Kilifi District Hospital. In 2004 after some work at more national level on quality of paediatric care he moved to Nairobi where he continues to work with the programme as a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow. He was made Professor of International Child Health in Oxford in 2010. His work has included developing national, evidence-based guidelines for care of severely ill children and newborns, at first in 2005 and then updated in 2010 andArray 2013. To complement these Mike and colleagues developed the ETAT+ course, adapting WHO’s ETAT course and expanding its scope to include evidence-based case management of serious illness in the child and newborn periods. The ETAT+ course is now provided with the help of multiple colleagues and the Kenya Paediatric Association with training conducted across Kenya and for Kenyan medical students. Others have taken the course to Rwanda, Uganda and Somaliland. More information on this course and the approach to developing national guidelines can be found at www.idoc-africa.org. The Health Services Unit he leads has undertaken long-term studies by a multidisciplinary team on initiating and establishing ‘best-practices’ within rural government hospitals. This has resulted in a Kenyan team working with the support of international collaborators on hospital performance measurement, cost-effectiveness, motivation, task-shifting, and barriers to implementation. More recently work has started on governance, leadership, human resources for health and knowledge translation. The group are well known for their work on measuring and testing interventions to improve paediatric and neonatal quality of care. Mike and the group work closely with the Kenyan Ministry of Health and he provides technical advice to WHO on a range of issues related to child and newborn survival.

Dr. Emelda Okiro

Emelda has over 15 years of professional experience in Epidemiology and Public health and heads the Population health unit. She has worked for the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, Philips Research Africa and also worked with several partners including PMI and ICF Macro.

Emelda returned to the KEMRI Wellcome Trust Research Programme in October 2016 from a Senior Health Scientist position at Philips Research Africa. She is leading the Population Health unit and Research theme within the Programme which aims to understand changing epidemiology of malaria, understand the determinants of health transitions and vulnerabilities at fine scales a major component of which is malnutrition in Kenya and across Africa, and to embed the use of data for decision-making by national ministries.

Her current work focuses on exploring the spatial heterogeneity of child survival across Kenya using multiple survey data to map and explore the Spatial, Social and Environmental determinants of childhood mortality. Emelda has previously worked on the measurements of trends of P. falciparum burden across sites of varying malaria endemicities in Africa and on evaluating the impact of scaled malaria control interventions and supporting regional Ministries of Health in Uganda, Malawi and Kenya. At the Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), University of Washington, Seattle Emelda worked on identifying determinants of cost-effective anti-retroviral treatment programs in Kenya, Uganda and Zambia.

During her academic research career, she has been awarded two internationally competitive Wellcome Trust Research Fellowships. Emelda is widely published and has a Bachelor’s degree in Chemistry and Biochemistry from Egerton University, Kenya and a PhD in Epidemiology through the Open University – UK in collaboration with Warwick University, UK.

Dr. Ambrose Agweyu

Affiliation(s):

Initiative to Develop African Research Leaders, KEMRI – Wellcome Trust, Kenya

Ambrose is a Kenyan paediatrician and epidemiologist, based at the KEMRI-Wellcome Trust Research Programme in Nairobi. Working closely with the Kenya Ministry of Health in 2009, his early research involved conducting systematic reviews for a national exercise to adapt the World Health Organization pneumonia clinical practice guidelines using the GRADE methodology. Following this, Ambrose was invited to support similar exercises in Uganda and Rwanda. More recently, he was the principal investigator on a large pragmatic clinical trial comparing antibiotic treatments for childhood pneumonia. The findings of this study contributed towards a recent major revision in the Kenyan guidelines, and are likely to eventually influence practice in the region.

For his postdoctoral fellowship under the IDeAL Programme, Ambrose is analysing routine inpatient data collected from an existing clinical information network of 14 Kenyan hospitals to identify high risk groups of children with pneumonia as potential target populations for future interventional studies.

As a member of the core team brought together by the Government of Kenya to drive the Kenya Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Pneumonia (KAPP), Ambrose is also actively involved in advocacy on how best to implement prevention and care for childhood pneumonia and campaigning for greater attention to be paid to this major childhood killer.