Throughout sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia, 75-90 percent of the poorest women give birth at home, often without experienced support. In resource-poor settings, the postnatal period is the most neglected in the birth continuum—only 13 percent of women in developing countries receive care within 24 hours of giving birth. As a result, many women and babies die unnecessarily every year.

My colleagues and I were awarded 1 of 20 seed grants as part of the Saving Lives at Birth Grand Challenge to implement a mHealth project called Baby Monitor in Kenya. Baby Monitor is a clinical screening platform and referral system that will increase access to primary care; improve the quality of service delivery; and make better use of limited numbers of skilled attendants and community health workers by connecting women and infants in resource-poor settings to care based on a woman’s direct responses to screening questions presented remotely through an interactive voice response system.

Read more about our work here.

I am working with colleagues at the Population Council on a variety of projects designed to provide decision-makers, NGOs, youth advocates, UN country representatives, and members of government ministries with the appropriate knowledge and tools to effectively make the case for implementing policies and programs that are evidence-based and targeted at vulnerable subgroups of young people, in particular girls.

Projects:

• Adolescence In-Depth: A report on the 2008 Liberia Census
• A project to develop guidelines for conducting youth-focused analyses of census data
• Development of a prototype web application that links data to policy
• Support to UNFPA's MDG5b+ Info database

The Population Council, with support from the Hewlett Foundation, is promoting evidence-based programming and policymaking in sub-Saharan Africa through the "Demographic Data for Development" project. The first phase of this project explored barriers to data sharing and use in a series of case studies in Ethiopia, Ghana, Senegal and Uganda. Results indicated that international donors and organizations, not local policymakers, drive the demand for data. To increase domestic demand for data—and thereby promote the use of data for decision-making—barriers to access and use of existing data must be addressed. In the second phase of this project, the Council is working with partners in Ghana, Senegal and Namibia to help members of the media access and use data in their reporting on development issues as one way to promote data-driven policies and programs. We designed Data Uncovered to promote data sharing and use.

Data Uncovered Blog

The Women's Income Generating Support (WINGS) program is a collaborative research and development program between IPA and AVSI in northern Uganda. WINGS is helping 1,800 persons--primarily highly vulnerable young women--to develop microenterprises after several years of war and internal displacement. Through in-depth qualitative research, behavioral games, and a randomized impact evaluation, the WINGS program and study will answer crucial development questions, including:

• Can small grants programs help the most vulnerable women develop sustainable livelihoods?
• What are the contributions of business skills, capital, and social networks to microenterprise success?
• What are the determinants of entrepreneurship among the most vulnerable?
• What is the link between economic activity and women's empowerment, status, and political participation?
• What are the indirect effects of earned income on child health and education?
• What role do risk attitudes, impulsiveness, altruism, trust, and public-mindedness play in group and poverty dynamics?
• What is the role of husbands and partners in women's empowerment?
• What level of follow-up support is required for business success?

Principal Researchers:

• Jeannie Annan
• Chris Blattman
• Eric Green
• Julian Jamison

Project website

Characteristics of the social and physical environment—the social ecology—can positively or negatively influence the health and well-being of adolescents, including their ability to avoid contracting HIV and other diseases. This environmental/structural view suggests that risk for disease cannot be solely explained by characteristics of individuals, such as knowledge of HIV transmission or attitudes towards risky sexual behavior. The broader social ecology—from micro-level influences such as household resources, neighborhood disorder, and social networks to macro-level factors such as laws and policies—can restrict or enhance individual agency to avoid risk. Thus in developing prevention interventions, it is necessary to understand and address social-ecological factors that influence health in a particular context. This project examined the use participatory mapping and geospatial technologies to understand the context of disease and to inform the development of a setting-level HIV prevention intervention in Muhuru Bay, a small fishing village on the shore of Lake Victoria in western Kenya.

Green, E. P., Rieck, V., Broverman, S., & Puffer, E. (2010, April). Community Health and Activity Mapping. Talk presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, Washington, DC.

The Bellevue/NYU Program for Survivors of Torture provides comprehensive medical and mental health care, as well as social and legal services to survivors of torture and war traumas and their family members. I was a postdoctoral research fellow at PSOT from 2008-09.

More than twenty years of fighting between the Government of Uganda and the rebel group, the Lord's Resistance Army, resulted in thousands of deaths, injuries, and abductions, in addition to the displacement of more than 90 percent of the northern population. Improvements in security following a 2006 Cessation of Hostilities agreement encouraged families to begin to leave the crowded internal displacement camps that they had called home for many years. I arrived in northern Uganda in 2007 to study this process of community rebuilding. For most of the year I lived in a camp 30km outside of Gulu called Opit. My local research team and I used a variety of methods to study population movement and rebuilding, including mapping, household surveys, in-depth interviews, and Photovoice.

More details about Photovoice.

Townley, G., Kloos, B., Green, EP., Franco, MM. (2011). Reconcilable differences? Human diversity, cultural relativity, and sense of community. American Journal of Community Psychology, 47(1-2), 69-85.

Green, E & Kloos, B. (2009). Facilitating youth participation in a context of forced migration: A Photovoice project in northern Uganda. Journal of Refugee Studies, 22(4), 460-482.


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