Project Title: Strengthening health and disease modelling for public health decision making
Project Description: Africa’s climate is changing in divergent and uncertain ways, driving drastic changes in the population dynamics, distribution, and seasonal abundance of mosquitoes, with consequential impacts on human disease risk. The effects of extreme weather on rapid human population growth, behaviour, livelihoods and urbanisation, may intensify vector-borne disease transmission and challenge health systems. To meet these challenges, countries must understand and assess how the effectiveness of health systems for disease control, the adaptability of public health... Africa’s climate is changing in divergent and uncertain ways, driving drastic changes in the population dynamics, distribution, and seasonal abundance of mosquitoes, with consequential impacts on human disease risk. The effects of extreme weather on rapid human population growth, behaviour, livelihoods and urbanisation, may intensify vector-borne disease transmission and challenge health systems. To meet these challenges, countries must understand and assess how the effectiveness of health systems for disease control, the adaptability of public health decision-makers to emerging threats, and the distribution and seasonality of key vectors will react to these changes i.e., be proactive in optimizing interventions, developing functional early warning tools, and generating robust evidence- based decision-making systems. The MoDD Africa Project forms an initial collaborative network of modelers, researchers, and decisionmakers to deliver model-based evidence, advice and forecasting, tailored to support national-specific decision-making for malaria control - special emphasize in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria and Tanzania. The aim is to deliver insights on the relationships between environmental changes (EC), vector, disease and health systems; solutions to optimise performance of new/existing interventions; outputs for immediate utility and impact, and pathways to engage and capacitate decision-makers and scientists across Africa. This is done through pushing innovation and deployment of unique geostatistical analytical architectures that respond to known and emerging malaria research, and strategic and policy questions concerning these malaria endemic countries (MECs) to generate high-quality and robust model-based product that will be used to communicate evidence at various levels i.e. global, regional and national-level stakeholders including the national malaria control programs (NMCPs) to understand the malaria transmission and risk profiles, guide policy formulation, control planning, monitoring and evaluation. The work packages for the MoDD Africa project aim in generating: 1. Understanding on the distribution and seasonality of vectors in the context of current EC, 2. Interlinks of EC and malaria health system capacity for optimal intervention effect, 3. Unified entomological and epidemiological models that delivers early warning systems for emerging health threats under EC, and, 4. Unified framework for skill strengthening, networking, and connectedness to maximize impact.
Principal Investigator : Suzan Rumisha
Department Name :
Time frame: (2024-11-01) - (2028-08-31)
Wellcome Trust (Normal)
External Collaborating Partners
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