African Data Scientists Set to Gather in Kigali for the 3rd DS-I Africa Consortium Meeting

By Akros Media on November 4, 2023 in GIS, Health Data Systems, News

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

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KIGALI, RWANDA – November 3, 2023 – The Data Science for Health Discovery and Innovation in Africa (DS-I-Africa) Consortium is thrilled to announce the 3rd DS-I Africa Consortium Meeting, a significant event that promises to foster collaboration and innovation in the field of data science and health across Africa.

The event will convene from November 3 to 9, 2023, at the prestigious Kigali Serena Hotel and Conference Centre in Kigali, Rwanda. This in-person meeting is set to be an exceptional gathering of over 250 researchers and stakeholders, both from Africa and around the world, who are eager to exchange ideas, showcase their groundbreaking work, and drive the future of data-driven healthcare solutions.

DS-I Africa, launched in September 2021 through funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Common Fund and 11 other NIH Institutes, Centers, and Offices, has been at the forefront of advancing data science capacity and fostering data-driven healthcare solutions in Africa. The program started with 19 funded projects and has recently grown to support 38 projects in 21 countries across the continent.

Michelle Skelton, the project lead for the DS-I Africa Coordinating Centre at the University of Cape Town, expressed her enthusiasm, stating, “The next few days here in Kigali are earmarked for our Data Science Community to reconnect and plan for the future of data-centered healthcare.”

The program highlights include:

  1. Datathon (November 4-5): A two-day event designed to harness the diverse expertise within the consortium. Participants will be introduced to the eLwazi Open Data Science Platform and explore compute deployment.
  2. Networking Exchange (November 6): Open to data science-related organizations, this event offers an informal platform for participants to engage with DS-I Africa and its members and to gain insights into their projects. It’s akin to a scientific poster session, promoting collaboration and information exchange.

This prestigious event features such special guests as Professor Muganga Didas Kayihura (Vice Chancellor University of Rwanda), Dr. Eugene Mutimura (Executive Secretary of Rwanda National Council for Science and Technology), and Dr. Peter Kilmarx (Acting Director, Fogarty International Center, NIH). The lineup of keynote speakers includes such experts as Dr. Luqman Lawal, Dr. Ciara Staunton, Dr. Dirk Brand, Associate Professor Deshen Moodley, Dr. Akbar Waljee, and Dr. Ann Mwangi, among others.

The comprehensive program covers themes addressing critical areas of concern, including Sustainable Data Analysis Pipelines, Data Governance and Cross-border Data Sharing, Opportunities to Harness Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning for Health in Africa, and Strategies for Effective and Equitable Partnerships. Additionally, there will be a follow-up discussion with colleagues from the Wellcome Trust.

For more information about the DS-I Africa Consortium and the event, please visit the official website https://dsi-africa.org/.

Stay up-to-date by following us on Twitter: @DSI_Africa and join the conversation using the hashtags #DSIAfrica and #Datascience.

 

Contact:

Michelle Skelton, Principal Investigator, H3Africa Administrative Coordinating Centre & DS-I Africa Coordinating Centre

Integrative Biomedical Sciences, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Cape Town

Anzio Road, Observatory, 7925

Tel: +27 (0) 828103031

Email: Michelle.Skelton@uct.ac.za

 

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About DS-I Africa:

The Data Science for Health Discovery and Innovation in Africa (DS-I-Africa) Consortium is committed to advancing data science capacity and data-driven healthcare solutions in Africa. Funded by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), DS-I Africa is a network of 38 projects across the continent, working together to shape the future of healthcare through data science. For more information, please visit https://dsi-africa.org/.

Disclaimer – University of Cape Town This email is subject to UCT policies and email disclaimer published on our website at http://www.uct.ac.za/main/email-disclaimer or obtainable from +27 21 650 9111. If this email is not related to the business of UCT, it is sent by the sender in an individual capacity. Please report security incidents or abuse via https://csirt.uct.ac.za/report-incident

eCHIS and Reveal set to integrate to geo-enable integrated health campaigns in Kenya

By Akros Media on May 16, 2023 in GIS, Health Data Systems, News, NTDs, Uncategorized

Akros, with support from the END Fund through the Deworming Innovation Fund, worked with the Division of Vector Borne and Neglected Tropical Diseases (DVB NTD) of Kenya’s Ministry of Health (MOH) to improve the quality of neglected tropical diseases (NTD) microplanning in routine deworming programs.

During this project, Akros applied several tools to the microplanning process to support the six-step WHO microplanning strategy. Four counties in Western Kenya used the tools for schistosomiasis (SCH) and soil-transmitted helminthiasis (STH) mass drug administration (MDA) campaigns in Kenya in 2021 and 2022. Vihiga County also deployed Reveal to track campaign resource usage and coverage outcomes at the community catchment level. Qualitative feedback through focus groups and survey responses showed that use of the geo-enabled process successfully guided teams through deeper population analysis, and led to more efficient allocation of drug resources and human resources for the MDA, as well as improved coverage and reach of the MDAs. Drawing upon user feedback on the microplanning process and tools, Akros adapted the microplanning features into the existing Reveal platform, an open source digital global good.

Mapping Data Flows for COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Surveillance in Namibia

By Alinda Lauer on February 9, 2023 in COVID-19, Health Data Systems, News

Medicines and vaccines have transformed the modern world. Thanks to these innovations, diseases that used to kill large populations have been controlled over the past century, enabling more of the world’s population to live long and healthy lives and contribute to the global economy and scientific advancements. Key to the success of these tools is the science of pharmacovigilance­—the detection, assessment, understanding, and prevention of any adverse effects related to the use of a specific medicine or vaccine.[1] While all medicines and vaccines undergo rigorous clinical trials, such testing environments cannot account for all factors that products will come in contact with when used by large, heterogeneous populations over long periods. Due to time restraints and limitations on the types of individuals eligible to participate in clinical trials safely (typically not individuals with concurrent diseases, young children, or pregnant women), some side effects related to vaccine or medicine use can only be detected after the products have been widely released.

Countries require robust safety surveillance systems capable of timely detection, reporting, and analysis of adverse events in order to ensure the long-term safety of drugs and vaccines once they are available on the market. Such systems implement advanced pharmacovigilance approaches to ensure healthcare workers diagnose these events, quality data is captured for each event, and teams of experts are available to review the data and take appropriate actions. Ensuring comprehensive and timely surveillance is critical to individual patient safety and an essential factor in ensuring the public trust in medicines and vaccines.

Akros joins Mastercard Foundation and Africa CDC’s Saving Lives and Livelihoods initiative

By Akros Media on August 9, 2022 in COVID-19, Health Data Systems, News

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

August, 2022

 

We are thrilled to announce Akros Research has been awarded funding through Mastercard Foundation and Africa CDC’s Saving Lives and Livelihoods initiative! The Mastercard Foundation is a Canadian foundation and one of the largest in the world with more than $40 billion in assets. The Foundation was created in 2006 through the generosity of Mastercard when it became a public company. Since its inception, the Foundation has operated independently of the company. The Foundation’s policies, operations, and program decisions are determined by its Board. Africa CDC is a specialized technical institution of the African Union that strengthens the capacity and capability of Africa’s public health institutions as well as partnerships to detect and respond quickly and effectively to disease threats and outbreaks, based on data-driven interventions and programs.

Saving Lives and Livelihoods is a partnership that enables the purchase of COVID-19 vaccines for at least 65 million people and supports the delivery to millions more across the continent. It will also lay the groundwork for vaccine manufacturing in Africa through a focus on human capital development, and strengthen Africa CDC. The partnership builds on the ongoing efforts of AVAT, COVAX, WHO, and local governments to provide access to vaccines to Africa and support the African Union’s goal of vaccinating 70 percent of Africa’s population by the end of 2022. This joint initiative will focus on four key areas:

  • Pillar 1—Purchase at least 50M COVID-19 vaccine doses
  • Pillar 2—Support deployment of COVID-19 vaccine doses
  • Pillar 3—Strengthen vaccine manufacturing of human vaccines
  • Pillar 4—Strengthen Africa CDC’s capacity and capabilities

When good leadership meets smart technology for malaria prevention

By Parysa Oskouipour on October 30, 2019 in Health Data Systems, Malaria, News

On a sweltering summer day in Siavonga, a lakeside jewel of Zambia’s Southern Province, I sat down with Mr. Bisael Phiri, the District Surveillance Officer for Siavonga District, to get his perspective on the malaria situation in his region and at large in Zambia. A breeze lazily floating through an open window and a small desktop fan provided the only reprieve from the oppressive heat as we got down to brass tacks about the progress made in the last few seasons of malaria interventions and how Reveal has impacted that progress.

Team members using Reveal-enabled tablets during an IRS campaign.

Mr. Phiri has been working in public health for several years, and is a big picture thinker when it comes to tackling malaria in Zambia. His motivations to work in this field are straightforward, “I know the kind of impact that good health can have on people’s lives. I wanted to do this work to help change the environment so it doesn’t constitute a danger to the public.” His work is based in one of the select districts of Southern Province that utilizes Reveal for their indoor residual spraying (IRS), mass drug administration (MDA), and reactive IRS malaria interventions through a PATH MACEPA and Akros-implemented program. Reveal is a powerful, open-source platform that aids in household-level intervention management and data authenticity by using spatial intelligence and smart planning tools. Mr. Phiri stresses that learning how to use this technology is self-explanatory and that the dashboards, which are tailored to his administrative level, greatly assist his day-to-day responsibilities. In his own words, “the dashboard is important to view on a daily basis because it identifies the status of various teams and shows us where we need to go and where the problem areas are. When we have this information, we can change our strategy based on how well our teams are performing, and change targets midway if need be. For instance, if I didn’t receive updated data from a certain district, I would not know that there’s an issue there. Now because I have these data, I would be able to make a quick plan for how best to move forward with that district.”

Beyond program planning, Mr. Phiri’s work is strengthened by the hard proof the platform provides that work is being done where it is supposed to be done.

Reveal takes aim at malaria parasite through mass drug administration campaigns in Southern Province, Zambia

By Parysa Oskouipour on September 18, 2019 in Health Data Systems, Malaria, News

Deep in Zambia’s Southern Province, in a town a three-hour drive away from the district’s largest city and economic hub (Siavonga), lies Manchamvwa Health Facility. This clinic serves as the focal point for the health needs of hundreds of people who live in the surrounding villages, and as such, is often overwhelmed with the many health needs of its patients. Malaria season in particular tends to put a great strain on the facility, with peak periods in previous years seeing anywhere from 100 to 200 cases per month.

Over the last couple of years, the Government of the Republic of Zambia (GRZ), with the assistance of Akros and PATH’s Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation-funded Malaria Control and Elimination Partnership in Africa (MACEPA), have been working with the National Malaria Elimination Program district staff to overcome these numbers and improve the health of the local community by using geospatial technology to optimize indoor residual spraying (IRS) campaigns. Recently, the two organizations teamed up again to be the first to ever use Reveal’s spatial intelligence approach to maximize reach and ensure accountability in a mass drug administration (MDA) campaign that distributed antimalarials to the doorstep of each community member in three districts of Southern Province.

Lake Kariba’s still, glistening waters at sunset.

The recent history of malaria in Southern Province is one of resounding progress thus far. Due to its proximity to Lake Kariba’s glistening, still water, it is unfortunately a heavily malaria-burdened region by nature. But malaria in this region is highly seasonal, linked to the annual arrival of rainfall from December to April, leaving ample overgrowth and standing water—prime mosquito-breeding real estate. This seasonality provides an attractive window through which most interventions have taken aim. The result has been an impressive decrease in prevalence of malaria parasitaemia among children less than five years of age, from 15.5% in 2006, to 5.5% in 2010, and 0.0% in 2018.1,2 Trends like these make Southern Province appealing as a prime candidate for malaria elimination. However, despite overall improvement in the province’s malaria burden at large, districts directly adjacent to the lake are still at higher risk, as malaria cases have shown to be persistently high in some health facilities despite ongoing interventions.

To propel Southern Province closer to elimination, in 2014 MACEPA supported the national program with a malaria MDA research study in the Southern Province districts lining Lake Kariba, an area with an estimated population of 300,000 people. The rapid malaria reduction in the study area resulted in Zambia adding MDA to its arsenal of interventions in 2017. The country’s experience of malaria MDA—two rounds with one month in between doses­—has shown it to be an effective intervention in areas with a strong foundation of vector control, case management, and surveillance. Recognizing that MDA campaigns are most effective when every household and individual in the targeted region are reached, MACEPA engaged Akros for its technical expertise in introducing Reveal as a novel approach to maximize the impact of MDA for malaria control and elimination in this area.

Operationalizing spatial intelligence means saving lives

By Anna Winters on March 21, 2019 in Health Data Systems, Malaria, News

As a spatial epidemiology PhD student, I was drawn to questions about how the environment relates to and facilitates vector-borne disease (diseases that are spread by vectors like mosquitos). These questions and interests tend to lead spatial epidemiology graduate school students (like I was) straight into the land of building spatial models. We effectively try to understand how measures like wetness, greenness, and elevation may combine mathematically to tell us where high numbers of mosquitoes live. If those mosquitoes live near human hosts, or even animals, there may be greater risk of vector-borne diseases.

So, I too built a lot of maps and models during graduate school. I mapped the risk of West Nile virus (WNV) in Colorado, USA. At the time, WNV had, somewhat shockingly, erupted in that region of the US. I also modeled human plague in Uganda—effectively developing maps to precisely depict areas at high and low risk of plague transmission. “Target interventions where it’s red” was the more-or-less summary, where red equaled high-risk areas. Point made. Thesis closed. Safe on the shelf.

But here I sit on the other end of the world, far away from hallowed academic halls that are often lined with dead dissertations and theses like mine. Here in southern Africa, disease transmission is much more tangible. Before, I read about death rates due to malaria and HIV from my school in Colorado, US. Here, I witness the impact of those death rates every day when I drop my kids off at school—new graves being dug closer and closer to the road. I am involved with a local school that is inundated with orphans and vulnerable children—even from one of the more affluent regions of Zambia. In this environment, high morbidity and mortality rates are incessant. Help is highly dependent on securing increasingly limited resources. Navigating the challenging logistics of getting those resources to the right people at the right time and in the right place are often broken. However, despite the acute need to target limited resources, mapping approaches like the one I developed in school are rarely seen nor used to inform interventions.

It is time for the public health community—both globally and locally—to do business differently. It’s time to more appropriately lean on the idea of spatial intelligence through epidemiological and map-based approaches to inform the practice of intervention planning and delivery. Academic, math-based modeling can lend a good understanding of where and how we should focus our limited resources to save the most lives. “Why aren’t these approaches being actively used?” you might ask. Part of the challenge is a lack of tools and finite planning approaches to translate maps and models into operational, boots on the ground, public health programming decisions. Questions like, “Where are all the houses located?,” “Which houses exactly should receive the intervention based upon the model output?,” and “Has the intervention effectively reached everywhere it was targeted?” are challenging to assess, particularly in regions like here in southern Africa, where so many areas consist of rural villages with no addresses.

The Inside of Context is King

By Anna Winters on January 31, 2019 in Capacity Building, Health Data Systems, News

Akros is a bit different than most development NGOs. Instead of a large corporate office in a distant setting, Akros bases its team in Southern Africa. If we are solving problems in rural developing contexts, shouldn’t we be near enough to the challenges so we understand them? We have chosen to be close to the beneficiaries of our work to receive feedback, learn from what works and what doesn’t, and provide simple yet innovative solutions to the everyday problems that are faced. Since our goal is to provide support to communities and their governments and to transition lessons learned into sustainable programs, shouldn’t we work very closely with our government partners both in the office and in the rural communities we serve?

We think yes. And that’s driven our design.

At Akros, we bring innovative ideas for gathering and using data to solve development challenges through a “boots on the ground” approach. We’ve built our organizational culture and nuanced approach to implementation by being where our work is: in Southern Africa. Akros has been supporting government and partner counterparts from our headquarters in Lusaka, Zambia for over ten years. This close partnership has helped to contextualize our work and to ensure that we are only scaling ideas and approaches that are proven to make impact and be sustained in under-resourced settings.

It’s all about the maps

By Anna Winters on January 15, 2019 in Health Data Systems, News

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set out big goals and targets—and countries are making real progress in some cases. Under five mortality has reduced by 58% in under 20 years. New drugs and vaccines are continuously coming to market. Some diseases, like polio and guinea worm, are nearing elimination.

Even still, large gaps remain. Every day, 3,000 children die from malaria. About 100,000 children die from HIV-related causes each year. These are diseases that are entirely preventable and treatable. Malaria is controlled with mosquito bed nets, antimalarial treatment courses, and insecticides. Antiretroviral treatments are making it possible for people living with HIV to live a long, healthy life.

If solutions exist, then why do we continue to see such levels of morbidity and mortality in the developing world? Too often it comes down to a lack of the right tools in the right place and at the right time. In seventeen malaria endemic countries in Africa, for example, indoor residual spraying (IRS) is used at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars per year to kill mosquito vectors of malaria. In many cases, this tool is not achieving its full potential of reducing malaria, in part because it is not distributed to obtain a high enough true coverage. The World Health Organization tells us that IRS must be applied to at least 85% of a community in order to reach “true” coverage. Given the costs and the lack of enough resources to go around, the impact of this intervention sways further away from optimally saving lives from malaria.