Team Uganda: Wrapping up in Ntenjeru and heading North

The TAMTAM Uganda team has focused the last two weeks on managing the data collection efforts in Ntenjeru and on establishing connections with the political, medical, and non-governmental organizations that fight malaria in Uganda.

We have been working hard to go with VHTs on home visits as often as possible to ensure data quality and consistency. The VHTs have done a great job, and it has been very informative for us to be able to see challenges as they occur and fix them in real time. The VHTs are doing one last large push today and tomorrow to finish up the survey and then the collection will be wrapped up in Ntenjeru.

We also spent three days in Kampala meeting with individuals leading governmental and international malaria research and action organizations. We got up-to-date on the current efforts across all the different organizations in Uganda and established connections with individuals leading national research programs. There is currently a nationwide distribution of nets to pregnant women and children under five. After this category of people is covered, the government will then do a “top up” to distribute one net for every two people in every household. We were excited to learn that our results should be ready in time to inform the procedural development for this “top up” distribution. In August, we will be meeting with some of the organizations coordinating this to share our findings and recommendations.

Finally, we have started to plan the follow-up in Gulu. After meeting with our on-the-ground coordinator there, we have been working out the details of the budget and follow-up activities. We look forward to getting started on the training next week.