Hello from Ghana

Greetings from Accra, Ghana! TAMTAM has teams in Ghana and Uganda right now, and we will be updating this blog with information and stories about our work on TAMTAM’s 2010 summer projects.

Ghana makes the fifth country in which TAMTAM has conducted research or net distributions. For those who are new to the blog or to the organization, please check out our work at our website, and of course, we’re looking forward to telling you about our work throughout the summer.

We currently have a team of six people based in Accra. We are fortunate to have two members of the team, Esther Hsu and Paul Wang, who are officers of TAMTAM and who worked on the Uganda project last year. We also have four new team members: Julia Goldberg, Teague Hopkins, Matthew Raifman, and me, Leah Stern.

Last week, we had a set of very productive meetings, including one at the National Malaria Control Programme (NMCP) where we got a chance to listen to the planning discussions for the next major net distribution campaign in the Eastern Region in Ghana. The discussion included representatives from the President’s Malaria Initiative, ProMPT (Promoting Malaria Prevention and Treatment), and Nets for Life.

The TAMTAM team also met separately with ProMPT, an organization funded by USAID which works in partnership with NMCP, and they shared with us their insights from their work, which seeks to strengthen the NMCP’s work and engage stakeholders in malaria interventions.

We have a very nice office in Osu in downtown Accra in the offices of Deliver, a project of John Snow, Inc (JSI). The folks at Deliver have been wonderfully welcoming and have shared their extensive knowledge with us.

This week, we are looking forward to more meetings to discuss what evaluations would be most useful to policymakers. We’re also working to set up visits to potential local partners.

Stay tuned!