Our newest team member, Saumya Sao, had a first-author poster at the Consortium of Universities for Global Health (CUGH) annual international conference this past weekend. The conference's theme was "Addressing Critical Gaps in Global Health and Development," and was hosted virtually due to COVID-19.
Saumya's poster was titled "Understanding Male Involvement in Antenatal Care (ANC) in the Kilimanjaro Region of Tanzania: Barriers, Facilitators, and Opportunities for Engagement." Saumya received a grant through Duke University's Bass Connections program to conduct this work during her junior and senior years of undergrad at Duke University. Along with two Duke graduate students and research collaborators at the Kilimanjaro Clinical Research Institute, Saumya led a mixed methods study to better understand male partner engagement in antenatal care at two antenatal care clinics in northern Tanzania. Saumya joined her Tanzanian colleagues in Moshi, Tanzania during the summer of 2019 to carry out this work. Saumya hopes to continue to conduct research to reframe masculinity and male involvement in historically female roles and healthcare, and implement programming to improve maternal and newborn health by changing the way we view gendered norms and divisions of labor.
The work was presented by her colleague, Godfrey Kisigo, a Tanzanian physician and graduate of the Duke Master's of Science in Global Health program.
View the poster and other CUGH work here.
