Cervical cancer, a highly preventable and treatable disease, is disproportionately represented in low and middle income countries. This is largely due to inadequate access of screening and treatment services, lack of a trained health workforce, and implementation gaps in current prevention and treatment guidelines. In Kenya, these realities are all too apparent. Cervical cancer is the most frequent cancer among Kenyan women and national screening rates are currently less than 10%. Dr. Megan Huchko has partnered with the Kenya Medical Research Institute and the Kenyan Ministry of Health for the past five years to develop community-based strategies to improve access to cervical cancer screening and linkage to treatment.

Project: In conjunction with Dr. Huchko’s study team, students will have the opportunity to join test and iteratively improve an educational intervention around HPV-screening and vaccination for women living in western Kenya. Our team is working in collaboration with the Kenya Ministry of Health to develop more effective community-based strategies to deliver HPV testing to women, and increase vaccination rates among girls.  While originally funded to augment the MoH’s existing programs, the Covid pandemic has led to profound disruptions in health services, especially the nascent HPV vaccination programs. In the previous SRT groups, we have evaluated HPV, and now Covid-related stigma, and integrated those findings into an educational strategy.  The educational strategy will be piloted in fall 2021/spring 2022. The SRT students would be working on developing post-pilot evaluation tools for key stakeholders using both qualitative and quantitative methods, and if on-the-ground travel is possible, would work to administer these and analyze results.

Read more about the previous team’s work here and here. You can also read about the 2021 team’s time in their blogs here and here.

Please note that dates of the program are approximate.

Selection Criteria:

• Interest in global reproductive health
• Hardworking, flexible, and comfortable working with a team
• Prior experience with survey development, qualitative research, data analysis (qual and quant) would be a plus!