Establishing a Child Care Center in a Kenyan Hospital and the Summer Ahead
Babies were crying. Mothers were patting them on the back. Names were being called for appointments. “With all this information, what will you do about it?” Florence Mawere, a research technician with the Center for Global Reproductive Health, was taking us on a tour of the Lumumba Sub-County hospital in Kisumu, Kenya and specifically demonstrating her work testing samples for HPV in the lab. She asked us that question at the end of the day, referring to a different project we were working on. At that moment, though, we had a different idea. Isabel, Melat, and I (Sydney) spent two months in Kisumu working on launching the pilot study of a mobile health app that facilitates HPV screening for cervical cancer prevention. Part of our work was to understand how Florence processes samples at her lab, hence our presence at Lumumba. In our conversations with her, she explained the barriers to reproductive health and mentioned how the lack of childcare sometimes...