UTEP CHS Goes Global - Professor Spearheads Ugandan Partnership

Dr. Thenral Mangadu, Assistant Professor of Public Health Sciences, has established a successful community-academic partnership with INPACT (Innovation Program for Community Transformation) in rural Uganda, Africa that aims to address HIV prevention for adolescent girls, young women and men.

Dr. Mangadu and Mr. Alvin Muhwezi, executive director for INPACT, began their collaboration nearly two years ago after being introduced by a mutual professional contact. The duo connected quickly and began outlining goals for their partnership, including identifying ways to create sustainable evidence-based community paced interventions for HIV prevention and enhancing treatment outcomes in the target community of Kanungu, Rural Uganda. Located in southwestern Uganda, Kanungu District has a high prevalence for HIV/AIDS, malnutrition and malaria. HIV prevalence currently stands at 7.1%, teenage pregnancies account for approximately 50% of all pregnancies in the district and malnutrition is particularly high with 43% of children under 5 stunted, 14 percent underweight and 3 percent wasted.

Over time, Mangadu and Muhwezi began to develop intervention models for the Kanungu community blending Mangadu’s strategies in HIV prevention in El Paso, TX minority neighborhoods and INPACT’s focus on reflecting local context and culture. The partnership ultimately aims to address the social determinants of health (e.g. low household income, poor nutrition, and social and cultural factors) that increase individual, family and community vulnerability to health risks such as HIV and AIDS in Kanungu. Their work also includes prenatal care for HIV positive women, with a focus on increasing general health and pregnancy outcomes. The duo jointly presented “Addressing Malnutrition in Pregnant HIV positive Adolescent Mothers in Rural Uganda to Enhance Maternal and Child Health Outcomes,” at the 2017 World Congress on Metabesity in London, which garnered strong interest from conference organizers and supporters.

Specific to its health programs, INPACT has seen significant growth in both the quality and numbers of people served since the collaboration with UTEP began. The cross cultural experience sharing sessions between UTEP and INPACT around how to reach more vulnerable community members with health services, for example, helped INPACT introduce screening of Non Communicable Diseases among the elderly (65 years and above). Over the last 12 months, INPACT has seen the number of elderly seeking health services grow from an average of 50 per health camp to now close to 200. In January 2018, the organization introduced a new program, “Bashemera” (a local word meaning “They look good”) exclusively to address needs of the elderly.

INPACT has also seen an increase in the annual enrollment of HIV positive pregnant adolescents into its nutrition program from 34 in 2017 to 48 as of June 1, 2018, largely because of the information gained from the Metabesity conference in London.  Through experience sharing around community engagement, INPACT has revised the community health camp model to include nutrition screening during HIV Counseling and Testing Health Camps. By adding nutrition screening services, INPACT has seen a 30% increase in the number of community members who attend health camps. Introducing nutrition screening during HIV health camps is a model currently being used by the UTEP Mujer Saludable, Familia Feliz (Healthy Woman, Happy Family) program, which aims to improve healthy diets among women living in poor communities in the Paso del Norte region.

Future directions for the collaboration include adding more partners in Uganda, and finding ways to make the programming sustainable.  Thus far, the duo have applied for CDC global funds for HIV prevention, as well as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Grand Challenges program.

Go Miners!

Established in 2012, Innovation Program for Community Transformation (INPACT) is a rural community based organization with a core mission of empowering young people to access the full range of comprehensive services critical to living healthy and productive lives. INPACT builds upon five years of health programming in bringing an evidence-based, household-centered, comprehensive approach to increase access to HIV & AIDS testing and treatment for rural communities with a focus on young men and women in high HIV prevalent communities in the Kanungu district.

For more information about INPACT, please visit: www.inpactug.com