Knowledge Generation

Rebecca Hope of Youth Development Labs Inc. in the U.S. will design a survey to investigate how young men from Mali, Nigeria, India and Kenya view family planning and identify the social factors such as family and social media that influence how they make related decisions. Despite the often dominant influence of men on family planning decisions, most intervention programs focus on the women. They will use methods including interviews and co-design workshops with the male participants to design a mobile phone survey consisting of multiple-choice and open-ended questions.

Gautam Dantas of Washington University in the U.S. will measure the effect of the routine use of antibiotics to treat severe malnutrition or to minimize the risk of HIV infection in young children, on the bacterial populations and antimicrobial resistance genes in the gut. These currently recommended clinical practices might promote the spread of antimicrobial resistance genes to pathogenic bacteria, making infections impossible to treat. They will analyze fecal samples taken at different time-points from 234 children as part of two completed trials in Nigeria and South Africa.

Patrick Degnan with Rachel Whitaker and Rebecca Stumpf of the University of Illinois in the U.S. will harness the CRISPR bacterial immune system to develop a new technology called in vitro CRISPR-capture. They will use this tool to track the abundance and transmission of antimicrobial resistance elements among connected natural and human ecosystems in East Africa.

Rebecca Stumpf, Rachel Whitaker and Rebecca Smith of the University of Illinois in the U.S. will develop an approach that incorporates the role of many different organisms to track, model, and prevent the transmission of antimicrobial resistance in Western Uganda, where it is a major problem exacerbated by poverty and disease. It is not well understood how resistance to antibiotics spreads among bacteria. However, most analyses focus on the role of humans whereas animals are also likely to play an important role.

Elena Bertozzi of Quinnipiac University and Aparna Sridhar from UCLA School of Medicine in the U.S. will design a game-like tool to identify cultural norms that influence future family planning decisions in adolescent school children in Karnataka, India, to help improve contraceptive education. The majority of these children have access to technologies such as the Internet and cell phones. They will exploit this by developing a game where users create their ideal virtual family by selecting the numbers and spacing of the children, and the age they would like to have their first child.

Rebecca Thornton of the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign in the U.S. will test whether access to home pregnancy tests and thereby earlier confirmation of pregnancy status in rural areas of sub-Saharan countries encourages family planning. Currently, 25% of married women in sub-Saharan Africa who do not want more children are not using contraception. This is due in part to the high cost, and that when women know they are not pregnant they are more likely to use contraception than when they are unsure.

Alexander Aiken of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in the United Kingdom will use the Matched Parallel Cohort (MPC) method in a multi-site study to measure the impact of antibiotic-resistant infections on mortality in low-income countries in sub-Saharan Africa. More complete data on antimicrobial resistance for this population is greatly needed, even though preliminary data suggests that mortality rates are likely higher than for high-income countries.

Elmar Stroomer of Design without Borders Uganda Ltd. in Uganda will develop an interactive game combining methods from game-based learning to collect data on decisions made around family planning in Uganda. These data can then be used to develop strategies that encourage effective family planning for individuals and communities. They will recruit participants to co-create the game to simulate real-life situations using a human-centered design process.

Jennifer Brown of the University of Cincinnati in the U.S. will apply cultural consensus modeling (CCM) to identify cultural factors that affect contraceptive practices among South African adolescent girls aged between 14 and 17. This demographic currently has one of the highest rates of unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections (STIs). However, there is limited empirical data on the underlying reasons, particularly related to the use of so-called dual contraceptives, which protect against both pregnancy and STIs.

Paul Fleming of the University of Michigan School of Public Health along with Jay Silverman and Holly Shakya at the University of California, San Diego Center for Gender Equity and Health in the U.S. will learn about the social networks of husbands of adolescent girls in Niger, and how these networks influence decisions to use of family planning. The study will be conducted in collaboration with Pathfinder International, building on their Reaching Married Adolescents program.