DAI Global Health Hosting Panel and Presenting at Triangle Global Health Conference

September 11, 2018

DAI Global Health is hosting a plenary panel session, “Embedding social innovation: expanding and adapting community empowerment models to drive gender equality,” at the Triangle Global Health Consortium Annual Conference in Raleigh, North Carolina, on September 27.

The session will be moderated by WISE Development’s Technical Director, Georgia Taylor, who specializes in women’s economic empowerment, tackling violence against women and girls, improving women’s access to maternal, newborn, and child health, and sexual and reproductive health.

Georgia will be joined by: Dr. Fatima Adamu, Chief of Party for the Women for Health programme in Nigeria and DAI’s Technical Lead for Education for Women in Health; Dr. Mary Nambao, a public health specialist who previously worked as Deputy Director for mother health in the Zambian Ministry of Health and is currently a Child Health and Immunisation Advisor with JSI; Joanna Drazdzewska, a Grant Manager with Women and Children First, specializing in participatory learning and action; and Molly Rosett, a Program Officer supporting DAI affiliate IntraHealth International’s West Africa regional portfolio.

Aligned with this year’s conference theme, “Looking Toward the Future: Innovation for Global Health Impact,” the DAI Global Health panel focuses on expanding and adapting community empowerment models to drive gender equality. Panelists will share innovations from four contexts where social change is embedded in the community, and explore how the community empowerment, governance, accountability, and capacity-building dynamics of these social innovations result in better health outcomes for women and children.

The Women for Health programme trains women to become community health workers.

The panel will explore different perspectives on achieving much greater health impact by grounding interventions in the social realities faced by women in challenging contexts. It will consider approaches that go far beyond traditional training programmes and tackle women’s lack of agency at the community level for sustainable and scalable impact. Though each social innovation presented shares a common theme of women’s empowerment, each context has resulted in a variety of community-embedded implementation models that have the potential to deliver significantly greater positive health outcomes.

Additionally, DAI Global Health Vice President and Chief Technology Officer Bobby Jefferson and IntraHealth Digital Health Director Wayan Vota are presenting at the conference on a panel, “The State of Digital Health in International Development,” to explore how digital technologies are becoming an important resource for health services delivery and public health.

Finally, Susan Scribner, Greg Maly, and Robert Salerno are facilitating a workshop, “Outbreak Preparedness and Response Planning: The Critical Role of Communication.” This session will explore a real-world scenario of avian influenza in Vietnam through a short presentation and an applied simulation structured around the 2018 WHO guidelines on risk communication in emergencies and the Preparedness and Response Planning toolkit. It will explore the use of low-cost and locally appropriate information and communications technology to enhance on-the-ground sentinel surveillance and improve timely information exchange to reduce risk.

The nonprofit Triangle Global Health Consortium represents institutions and individuals from the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry, the international health development nongovernmental organization community, and academia. The 2018 Annual Conference brings together global health leaders to consider the ways that innovative ideas can create a positive impact on the communities in which we work.