Equitable health research requires actively engaging communities in producing new knowledge to advocate for their health needs. Community-based participatory research (CBPR) relies on the coproduction of contextual and grounded knowledge between researchers, programme implementers and community partners with the aim of catalysing action for change. Improving coproduction competencies can support research quality and validity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Many women in low- and middle-income countries, including Kenya, access antenatal care (ANC) late in pregnancy. Home pregnancy testing can enable women to detect pregnancy early, but it is not widely available. Our study explored the acceptability and potential of home pregnancy testing delivered by community health volunteers (CHV) on antenatal care initiation in rural Kenya.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Early attendance at antenatal care (ANC), coupled with good-quality care, is essential for improving maternal and child health outcomes. However, achieving these outcomes in sub-Saharan Africa remains a challenge. This study examines the effects of a community-facility health system strengthening model (known as 4byFour) on early ANC attendance, testing for four conditions by four months of pregnancy, and four ANC clinic visits in Migori county, western Kenya.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUrbanization is rapidly increasing across Africa, including in Nairobi, Kenya. Many people, recent migrants and long-term residents, live within dense and dynamic urban informal settlements. These contexts are fluid and heterogeneous, and deepening the understanding of how vulnerabilities and marginalization are experienced is important to inform pointed action, service delivery and policy priorities.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Improvements in maternal and infant health outcomes are policy priorities in Kenya. Achieving these outcomes depends on early identification of pregnancy and quality of primary healthcare. Quality improvement interventions have been shown to contribute to increases in identification, referral and follow-up of pregnant women by community health workers.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSafeguarding is rapidly rising up the international development agenda, yet literature on safeguarding in related research is limited. This paper shares processes and practice relating to safeguarding within an international research consortium (the ARISE hub, known as ARISE). ARISE aims to enhance accountability and improve the health and well-being of marginalised people living and working in informal urban spaces in low-income and middle-income countries (Bangladesh, India, Kenya and Sierra Leone).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Universal health coverage (UHC) is growing as a national political priority, within the context of recently devolved decision-making processes in Kenya. Increasingly voices within these discussions are highlighting the need for actions towards UHC to focus on quality of services, as well as improving coverage through expansion of national health insurance fund (NHIF) enrolment. Improving health equity is one of the most frequently described objectives for devolution of health services.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Practices of power lie at the heart of policy processes. In both devolution and priority-setting, actors seek to exert power through influence and control over material, human, intellectual and financial resources. Priority-setting arises as a consequence of the needs and demand exceeding the resources available, requiring some means of choosing between competing demands.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: HIV self-testing (HIVST) has the potential to increase uptake of HIV testing among untested populations in sub-Saharan Africa and is on the brink of scale-up. However, it is unclear to what extent HIVST would be supported by stakeholders, what policy frameworks are in place and how variations between contexts might influence country-preparedness for scale-up. This qualitative study assessed the perceptions of HIVST among stakeholders in three sub-Saharan countries.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHIV self-testing (HIVST) is increasingly being sought and offered globally, yet there is limited information about the test features that will be required for an HIV self-test to be easy to use, acceptable to users, and feasible for manufacturers to produce. We conducted formative usability research with participants who were naïve to HIVST using five prototypes in Kenya, Malawi, and South Africa. The tests selected ranged from early-stage prototypes to commercially ready products and had a diverse set of features.
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