Reproductive Health in Africa Speaker Series

By Uma Govindswamy November, as a part of the Center for Global Health’s Reproductive Health in Africa Speaker Series, sponsored by the Africa Initiative, Dr. Joy Noel Baumgartner and Dr. Rohit Ramaswamy lectured on the topic: Evaluating Quality in Maternal Health Interventions. Dr. Joy Noel Baumgartner is the Director of the DGHI Evidence Lab, the lead of the DGHI Global Mental Health Working Group, and a professor here at Duke University. She has been an active public health practitioner and researcher for over 20 years and has worked in countries such as Cameroon, Kenya, India, South Africa, Jamaica, Tanzania, Ghana, and Uganda. Dr. Rohit Ramaswamy is Director of the Center for Global Learning and a Professor in the Department of Maternal and Child Health at UNC’s Gillings School of Global Public Health. His past research has focused on implementing delivery systems that improve the quality of healthcare for women in low-resource settings including India, Ghana, Nigeria, and Uganda, to name a...

By Saumya Sao On November 1st, 2019, the Center had its first lunch talk in the 2019-2020 Reproductive Health in Africa lunch series. The panel focused on HIV stigma and reproductive health. I had the pleasure of moderating the panel, which was made up by: Megan Huchko, MD, MPH who is an OB/GYN and directs the Center for Global Reproductive Health at DGHI; Michael Relf, PhD, RN who is the Associate Dean for Global and Community Affairs in the School of Nursing; and Godfrey Kisigo, MBChB, who is a second year MSc-GH student and Tanzanian physician. Over the past year, I’ve had the privilege of working with Godfrey on a team led by Dr. Melissa Watt. Our team has been developing and carrying out an HIV stigma reduction intervention in Moshi, Tanzania. Throughout just two years of studying global sexual and reproductive health, I’ve seen how critical it is to consider the impact of stigma on care engagement and reproductive health education, so I...