Inside SMART Africa

On March 5, ICHAD held its 3rd Career Workshop Series for African students, led by Catherine Nkonge. This session taught attendees how to fine-tune their job search strategy. This workshop provided the participants with a strategy to find the right job by identifying the type of work they are interested in and what populations they […]

The ICHAD and SMART Africa Centers are going through an exciting moment in regards to training and creating a pipeline for young scholars. This year is particularly special given the numbers. Several ICHAD and SMART Africa colleagues will be moving on for further studies in the PhD, DrPH, and MPH programs. We are proud of […]

The ANZANSI Family Program seeks to pilot test the feasibility of an innovative combination intervention (Family economic empowerment and MFG) amongst adolescent girls at risk of dropping out of school and migrating to cities for work in Northern Ghana. Ten schools were selected based on high dropout rates using data obtained from Ghana Education Service. […]

SMART Africa-Ghana is a pilot study that tests the effectiveness of the MFG intervention amongst 180 children and their caregivers in northern Ghana. Before the Ghana government’s directive to close all schools, the SMART Africa-Ghana team had delivered up to session 6 of the MFG intervention in the treatment arm school where the intervention is […]

SMART Africa-Uganda is a scale-up study in Uganda that utilizes an adapted version of the evidence-based MFG intervention. This intervention has 16 sessions that aim to address behavioral health challenges in children and adolescents. This month marked the end of the 8-week follow-up assessments in the 8 schools that are currently receiving the MFG intervention […]

In the month of February, the ICHAD and SMART Africa Teams, along with our close collaborator the Africa Initiative, celebrated the soon to be newest members of our team. ICHAD and SMART Africa PhD Student William Byansi and his wife Anette, along with Africa Initiative Program Coordinator Bethel Mandefro and her husband Azaryas were “sprinkled” […]

Congratulations to SMART Africa Global Fellow, Dr. Tyrone M. Parchment who was recently selected as a LEAD Global Training Program fellow. This NIMH-funded program is designed for early-career researchers from underrepresented backgrounds who are interested in global mental health disparities research. Dr. Parchment’s research is centered on family behavioral interventions focused on engaging fathers and male caregivers. […]

In February, the ICHAD and SMART Africa teams welcomed Kurt Dirks, the Vice-Chancellor of International Affairs and the Bank of America Professor of Leadership to speak about “Developing Trust: Implications across Different Cultures.” In his engaging talk, we learned that while different cultures may have varying degrees on which trust is built (in India, this […]

This month’s Career workshop series for African Students was focused on Awareness of Cultural Differences. The discussion included sharing experiences about cultural differences based on beliefs, language, behavior, practice, biases and what impact this had. The group brainstorms ideas on how to address these impacts. Understanding different communication styles that are uniform to most cultures […]

The Kayayei Project seeks to provide insights into female adolescents’ unaccompanied migration for labor in Ghana. Following the translation of qualitative interviews, the U.S. team is currently cleaning the data and doing data quality checks to make sure it is ready for analysis. In addition, Dr. Abdallah (in-country Principal Investigator) traveled to Ghana and met with […]

The ANZANSI Family Program seeks to pilot test the feasibility of an innovative combination intervention (Family economic empowerment and MFG) amongst adolescent girls at risk of dropping out of school in Northern Ghana. This February, Dr. Proscovia Nabunya (Study Co-Investigator) and a team from Uganda, which included Dr. Abel Mwebembezi, Betina Nabisere, and Edward Nsubuga, […]

Suubi4Cancer seeks to identify confirmed and suspected cancer cases among a cohort of more than 3,000 youth living with HIV/AIDS in Uganda. This month the team continued to work on data cleaning and preparing for the upcoming clinical trial phase. The team is also preparing a publication which details the prevalence of cancer cases in […]