Awards

Sheetal Silal of the University of Cape Town in South Africa will establish a research consortium to analyze how climate change affects the transmission and control of mosquito-borne diseases, focusing on how to optimize interventions for malaria, chikungunya and dengue in Southern Africa. The consortium will integrate research projects led by local data scientists working closely with local decision-makers. Through mathematical and statistical modeling together with climate science, these projects will determine climate scenarios across time scales relevant for management of mosquito-borne diseases. These time scales will encompass short-term windows (6-12 months) as well as longer windows (5-10 years) relevant for policy planning and that incorporate the predicted impact and costs of new interventions. The consortium will also explore even longer windows (over 30 years) to provide predictions useful to initiate policy discussions and bring attention to the long-term implications of climate change on disease control strategies.

This grant is funded by The Wellcome Trust.

Roman Thibeaux of the Institut Pasteur de Nouvelle Calédonie in New Caledonia will examine how climate-driven soil changes and societal and behavioral factors can affect the incidence of leptospirosis to develop community-centered prevention strategies. The causal agent of the disease is the bacterium Leptospira, which can be found in water or soil contaminated with the urine of infected animals and thus can spread following heavy rainfall. Leptospirosis is endemic in the New Caledonia archipelago in the South Pacific, with potential climate-driven increases in incidence. Using soil microcosms in the laboratory, they will explore the effects of temperature, rainfall, and soil structure on Leptospira survival and dispersion. Through interviews and focus groups with New Caledonia community members together with ethnographic fieldwork, they will record local perceptions and knowledge relevant to leptospirosis and its transmission. In partnership with local community members and health authorities, they will then identify sustainable strategies to reduce leptospirosis incidence.

This grant is funded by the Pasteur Network.

Bryan Ranger of Boston College in the U.S. will develop a cost-effective, portable, and automated ultrasound tool to monitor nutritional health of young pregnant women in Ethiopia. The tool will incorporate AI models that guide users in collecting high quality data, so the tool can be used by frontline and community healthcare workers without extensive ultrasound training, and the models will use this data to predict metrics of nutritional status. In a pilot study conducted at the Jimma Medical center, they will create a database of ultrasound scans, anthropometry, body composition measured by gold standard techniques, and the associated clinical data from a group of young pregnant women. Ultrasound measurements will incorporate data on user position to identify the most informative positions via machine learning. They will survey clinical users to guide the ultimate design of the ultrasound system.

Susan Rumisha of Ifakara Health Institute in Tanzania will support the establishment of data modeling hubs in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, and Tanzania, linking them into a collaborative network to guide the control of mosquito-borne diseases in the face of climate change. The focus will be on the direct and indirect effects of environmental change on malaria, modeling the interplay of these effects with public health systems and mosquito vector and disease patterns. This will encompass modeling mosquito vector distribution, abundance, and seasonality using historical climate data together with new microclimate information. The models will be designed to support national programs in prioritizing vector surveillance activities, targeting interventions, and developing early warning systems for emerging health threats. The network will strengthen model-building expertise and could be adapted to address mosquito-borne arboviral diseases.

This grant is funded by The Wellcome Trust.

Bernard Bett of the International Livestock Research Institute in Kenya will develop disease transmission models for two Aedes mosquito-borne arboviral diseases, dengue and chikungunya, and use the models to design decision support tools to guide surveillance and control of these diseases in Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia. The models will be validated with longitudinal field data, including mosquito population density, infection patterns, blood meal sources, and the incidence of Aedes-borne diseases in humans. The models will be used to estimate important metrics for disease management, such as time-to-disease outbreak, cost effectiveness of control, and spatial distribution of risk. They will also help identify how the ecological tipping points for outbreaks of dengue and chikungunya compare to each other and how existing control measures for the two diseases could be integrated for better health outcomes. The project will link institutions including the Ethiopia Public Health Institute, Kenya’s Department of Disease Surveillance and Epidemic Response, Somalia’s Federal Ministry of Health, Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, Abrar University, the Kenya Medical Research Institute, Ohio State University, Global One Health Initiative, and the International Livestock Research Institute.

This grant is funded by The Wellcome Trust.

James Beeson of Burnet Institute in Australia, Melissa Kapulu of Health Research Operations Kenya Limited in Kenya, Isaac Ssewanyana of Infectious Diseases Research Collaboration in Uganda, Faith Osier of Imperial College London in the U.K. and Pras Jagannathan of Stanford University in the U.S., will analyze clinical samples using an antibody functional assay platform with malaria antigen arrays to identify antigens targeted by protective antibodies for next-generation malaria vaccines. They will identify antigen-specific functional antibodies that strongly correlate with protective immunity to malaria observed in clinical studies with two populations: Kenyan adults after controlled experimental challenge infection with Plasmodium falciparum and children followed longitudinally who were naturally exposed in Uganda and in Papua New Guinea. They will then use biostatistical modeling approaches to identify antigen and functional antibody types that most frequently occur in protective combinations, identifying additive and synergistic combinations of responses and responses most predictive of protective immunity across age groups and populations. This will enable prioritization of antigens and their combinations for malaria vaccine candidates.

Mary Mwanyika-Sando of Africa Academy for Public Health in Tanzania will develop a mathematical model that accounts for multiple co-occurring diseases and their interactions as well as resource constraints to design integrated healthcare services for people living with HIV in Burkina Faso, Tanzania, and South Africa. The team will use high-quality longitudinal data from four health and demographic surveillance sites. They will characterize co-morbidities and the syndemic clustering of HIV with other diseases (synergistic epidemics), including hypertension, diabetes, and depression, that is due to interrelated biological, environmental, and behavioral factors. They will use the model to predict current and future chronic disease burdens of HIV and other diseases, and then determine optimal health service delivery. The results will be used to co-design intervention implementation strategies with local implementers and policy makers.

Rajshekhar Karpoormath of the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa will test a set of potential anti-TB hit compounds against clinically relevant TB strains, using the results to generate optimized hit compounds for development of new anti-TB drugs. They will screen the potential hits against susceptible, monodrug-resistant, multidrug-resistant, and extensively drug-resistant TB strains as well as other Mycobacterium strains. The screening results will inform structure-based drug design to generate optimized hit compounds. Potential lead hits will be screened again, with the most promising evaluated against intracellular bacteria in macrophages, tested for in vitro cytotoxicity, and evaluated for mechanism of action in bioassays including carbon-isotope tracing metabolomics and an in vitro granuloma assay.

Solomon Hailemeskel of Debre Berhan University in Ethiopia will pilot test midwife-led birthing centers for pregnant women and newborns at low risk of complications to increase access to safe, high-quality childbirth experiences for Ethiopian women. They will implement a multicenter randomized controlled trial, recruiting a cohort of pregnant women from antenatal care clinics across diverse healthcare facilities to ensure a representative sample. After training midwives to provide continuity of care before, during, and after pregnancy, they will establish midwife-led birthing centers in dedicated spaces, either within or separate from a higher-level health facility. A subset of trial participants will be randomly assigned to the birthing centers. They will compare outcomes for the two groups, including data on maternal and neonatal health outcomes, as well as qualitative data from interviews of mothers, midwives, and healthcare providers.

Rapidemic in the Netherlands will collaborate with Mohammed Majam of Ezintsha in South Africa to develop a prototype for a molecular test for rapid multiplex diagnosis of chlamydia and gonorrhea, while determining the requirements for its deployment in South African primary care settings to serve hard-to-reach populations. The test system will be designed to diagnose symptomatic and asymptomatic patients accurately and inexpensively using a rapid and disposable test. To guide prototyping, they will research user preferences and assess the usability of the developed device. They will also conduct research to ensure that the development meets regulatory requirements for the South African market and addresses the needs of pharmacies and primary healthcare settings in South Africa.

Sona Shah of Neopenda, PBC in Kenya will integrate ChatGPT-4 as a virtual assistant for the wearable, vital sign monitor neoGuard, supporting healthcare providers in effectively monitoring and managing neonatal health. They will train ChatGPT-4 to help providers identify and address challenges with the neoGuard monitor, such as poor sensor placement on the patient, and to give providers appropriate recommendations based on vital sign data together with the clinical information they gathered. This real-time clinical decision support would be particularly beneficial in remote and understaffed healthcare facilities. For model training, they will use a dataset of newborns admitted to a hospital in Kenya, including vital signs, clinical histories, and treatment outcomes, as well as insights from unstructured clinical notes extracted using natural language processing. They will evaluate use of neoGuard with ChatGPT-4 for reliability, accuracy, and user-friendliness, and compare neonatal patient outcomes before and after ChatGPT-4 integration with the monitor.

Moses Obimbo Madadi of the University of Nairobi in Kenya and Aida Sivro of the University of Manitoba in Canada will determine the molecular epidemiology of human papillomavirus (HPV) in cervical cancer cases in Kenya to enable monitoring of changes in the prevalence of HPV types targeted by current vaccines and detect possible replacement with other types. They will perform a cross-sectional study on Kenyan women being followed-up for cervical cell abnormalities at hospitals in Nairobi and in rural Kenya. Outcome measures will include prevalence of HPV genotypes by age, geographic location, and HIV status. HPV genotypes will be stratified by cervical diagnosis to determine the top genotypes associated with cervical cancer. This research will provide robust and standardized statistics on the burden and genetics of oncogenic HPV infection in Kenyan women.

Mary Mbithi of the University of Nairobi in Kenya will test a childcare model in Kenya's Machakos County to increase women's economic participation, reduce and redistribute the burden of unpaid care, and shift gender norms related to childcare. This test will build on results from one tested by the University of Nairobi Women's Economic Empowerment Hub in a different Kenyan county and will inform the model's deployment more broadly across the country. In collaboration with the county government and the local community, they will establish childcare facilities in three sub-counties, including recruiting staff and participating children aged 0-4 years. They will measure impact on child growth, development, and school readiness, as well as measuring impact on women's economic empowerment, including video interviews as qualitative assessment of women's experiences. The county government will take over the running of the childcare centers at the end of the project.

Wambui Nyabero of Medevice Kenya in Kenya and Vibhav Joshi of InnAccel Technologies Pvt Ltd in India will pilot test Fetal Lite, a fetal monitor for early detection of fetal distress to reduce intrapartum mortality. The monitor is designed for ease of use and patient comfort. It measures fetal and maternal heart rate and uterine activity, has automated data analysis with audio and visual alerts, and has a built-in electronic partogram and AI-based pregnancy risk scoring. It is cloud-enabled with a central web dashboard for report sharing and trend monitoring. They will deploy devices in medical facilities associated with the University of Nairobi, measuring the quality of the auto-generated analysis compared to blinded expert annotation and the ease of use by nursing staff. They will also capture the associated birth outcomes, the guidance provided through remote monitoring, and the number of detected fetal distress cases and referrals.

Mike Baiocchi of Stanford University in the U.S. will use LLMs to analyze conversational interviews with adolescent girls and young women in Kenya to identify causal mechanisms impairing their health within the potential interplay between living with HIV, mental health conditions, and gender-based violence. Working with the Kenyan Medical Research Institute, they will re-identify and enroll a previously studied cohort living with HIV. The new longitudinal dimension of the study will contribute to untangling causes and effects in parallel to the new LLM-based analysis. They will use LLMs to create statistical measures of participants' descriptions of their experiences to help identify the underlying causes, for instance detecting differences between the responses of those experiencing violence or depression compared to those who have not. Such improved understanding will help to design and target appropriate health interventions.

Elizabeth Nyothach of Kenya Medical Research Institute in Kenya will explore introduction of SunPad, a prototype reusable menstrual pad, determining its acceptability, marketability, and regulatory requirements in Kenya. The SunPad product is made of fabric with a built-in cleaning and disinfecting process that is activated by sunlight. They will conduct focus group discussions with women in Kenya to understand their needs in terms of washing, drying, and reusing the pad, and to gauge their willingness to pay for the product. They will also research the potential for local manufacturing of the pad and determine the regulatory requirements and associated documentation.

Halfan Ngowo of Ifakara Health Institute with Sarah Osima of the Tanzania Meteorological Authority, both in Tanzania, and Mercy Opiyo of the Centro de Investigação em Saúde de Manhiça in Mozambique will perform data-driven modeling to better understand the impact of climate change and extreme weather events on mosquito-borne malaria transmission in African countries. They will compare data from countries more prone to such events (Mozambique) to those less prone (Tanzania and South Africa). They will use retrospective and newly generated data to model the increased risk of malaria transmission, encompassing human and mosquito behavior and disease dynamics. The models along with enhanced malaria risk assessment tools will be developed in user-friendly formats for use by local, regional, and continental health authorities. Through the project platform, they will train African data scientists and modelers and expand partnerships contributing to resilient malaria control strategies in the face of changing climate patterns.

Monika Shukla of Buzzworthy Ventures Private Limited in India will establish a women-led beekeeping network in India to enhance crop yields through bee pollination and improve women's livelihoods. The network will be established initially in one climate zone with a known array of crops. They will educate women about bee pollination for agriculture and provide hands-on training in scientific methods of beekeeping. They will provide multiple types of support for the network, including guidance on integrating weather information to determine optimal times for harvesting honey and deploying bees for pollination, advice on running a beekeeping business, and access to an AI-based app for advice on beehive management. They will also create a community center serving the network with educational programs and as a central site for warehousing honey and processing hive products.

Isaac Sseswanyana of the Infectious Diseases Research Collaboration in Uganda will investigate natural anti-parasite immunity to malaria to guide the development of improved malaria vaccines and therapeutics. Natural anti-parasite immunity is observed in malaria endemic regions in adults and infants who control parasitemia at low levels without developing symptoms, in the latter group likely due at least in part to the transfer of effective maternal antibodies. They will use existing samples from two longitudinal studies in Uganda to test the hypothesis that the repertoires, biophysical properties, and functional features of Plasmodium falciparum-specific antibodies are determinants of this natural immunity. They will also identify and characterize malaria-specific T cells that correlate with anti-parasite immunity and focus on evaluating cellular or proteomic predictors of durable anti-parasite antibodies.

Provat Saha of the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology in Bangladesh will support women-led, rural agricultural microenterprises in Bangladesh in deploying a set of climate-smart technologies to enhance their productivity and resilience to climate change. They will engage microenterprises distributed across three sectors: vegetable cultivation, fish farming, and poultry production. They will provide each with a system for user-friendly access to weather forecasts based on international weather models. Each will also receive a cost-effective system for real-time weather monitoring, consisting of a micro-weather station along with relevant sensors, such as soil moisture meters for crops, dissolved oxygen sensors for fisheries, and ammonia and light-intensity sensors for poultry farms. They will provide technical training and guidelines on using the technologies to improve farming decisions, and they will monitor outcomes, including reductions in time, labor, and costs.

Rashima Kazal of the Association of Voluntary Actions for Society in Bangladesh will support women smallholder farmers in the southern and southwestern coastal areas of Bangladesh to improve their livelihoods and enhance their resilience to climate change. They will form and strengthen self-help groups of women farmers, providing seed money to scale-up new ideas they generate on topics such as labor-saving technologies, climate-smart tools, and digital marketing. They will provide training for the groups, including on managing livestock, preventing crop failure, and ensuring family nutrition through low-cost, short-term agricultural production and through food processing techniques that enable year-round nutrition. They will also facilitate communication between rural women's groups and relevant government ministries, committees, and policymakers, so that the perspectives of rural women farmers can be integrated into climate adaptation policies and decisions.

Geraldine Mbagwu of Corona Management Systems in Nigeria will implement a pilot project in Bayelsa state in Nigeria that provides training to traditional birth attendants and links them with primary healthcare centers to improve maternal health outcomes. They will engage birth attendants and provide training on topics including using a mobile application to get the latest evidence and health guidelines, as well as training for identifying women with high-risk pregnancies and referring them to the appropriate level of care. They will also ensure access by the birth attendants to key maternal health products and services, including immunization and postpartum family planning. Better integration of traditional birth attendants into the healthcare system will embrace women's agency while improving health outcomes.

David Chiawo of Strathmore University in Kenya will develop an integrated approach that empowers women smallholder farmers in the Mount Kenya region to improve their livelihoods and adapt to climate change. The approach combines avocado cultivation, beekeeping for honey production, and bean farming. This integration will help women farmers optimize their limited land resources and diversify their income sources, with nitrogen fixation by beans improving soil fertility and increased pollination of avocado trees enhancing yield. The approach includes technology for digital tracking of avocados from farm to market, supporting product traceability and consumer trust to increase attractiveness for the export market. They will also establish a women-led aggregator system for farmers to pool their produce, negotiate better prices, and access larger markets more efficiently.

Emery Metelo of the Institut National pour la Recherche Biomedicale in the Democratic Republic of the Congo will test implementation by women and youth community members of a mosquito vector control program to reduce the burden of disease caused by Aedes-borne arboviruses. The program will be guided by local health authorities and the network of community health workers. It will be implemented over 15 months in two areas of the city of Kinshasa, and it will consist of community education and training of participants, followed by mosquito trapping and clearing of potential habitats for mosquito larvae. They will assess the program's effectiveness by comparing data before and after the intervention, including an arbovirus serosurvey covering dengue, chikungunya, Zika, and yellow fever, and an entomological survey of mosquitos and their larvae. They will also assess changes in relevant behaviors, knowledge, and perceptions due to community participation in the program.

Brioni Moore of Curtin University in Australia will perform a trial in Papua New Guinea to validate minimal transfer through breastmilk of the antimalarials primaquine and tafenoquine to enable access by postpartum women to radical malaria cure. Verifying minimal drug transfer in the first two weeks post-birth would enable maternal treatment before hospital discharge, preventing postpartum relapses and improving maternal health outcomes and malaria control. They will recruit a cohort of mother-child pairs in which the mother has confirmed vivax malaria or a recent history of it. They will then quantify the excretion of primaquine and tafenoquine in colostrum and transitional breast milk and determine relative infant exposure, while assessing indices of neonatal physiology.

Nicole Ertl of the University of Queensland in Australia will develop a molecular test prototype for diagnosis of gonorrhea and antimicrobial resistance of the causative agent Neisseria gonorrhoeae. To increase access to testing, they will design the nucleic acid-based test to be rapid, inexpensive, and to work at ambient temperature without the need for electricity. The prototype platform will combine a sample preparation reagent requiring only short incubation at room temperature, chemically heated isothermal amplification, and lateral flow detection. It will incorporate detection of a relevant genetic signature to distinguish sensitivity versus resistance to the relevant drugs ceftriaxone and ciprofloxacin. They will evaluate the sensitivity and specificity of this sample-to-results platform and its usability in settings with minimal laboratory and testing infrastructure.

Bastien Linol of Nelson Mandela University in South Africa will develop a platform for crowd-sourced monitoring of surface water and groundwater by local communities in rural areas of South Africa, Ghana, and Kenya. Through collaboration across the three countries, the platform will enable geoscientists to work together with local communities to characterize the availability and quality of water sources. The research teams will train local community members as citizen scientists to collect information on water sources and take weekly samples, with data entered into a mobile application. Together with geochemical analysis of the samples, the data will be entered into a database with an interactive website for user-friendly geographic analysis and reporting back to communities. This platform for participatory science will empower local communities to make recommendations to governmental water and sanitation agencies, helping solve the water-related challenges posed by climate change.

Rory Assandey of La Ruche Health in Côte d'Ivoire will expand an AI-based platform to provide youth with information on mental health and wellbeing, while increasing awareness about and access to relevant services. The platform will build on their voice-compatible chatbot KIKO, which is currently available through WhatsApp and used by marginalized youth for automated anonymous access to health guidance and to make appointments with clinicians. They will further develop their tool to make it usable through additional apps such as the Ministry of Health's DHIS2 and interoperable with additional sources of public health data. They will also improve its capabilities for data analysis and report generation to inform public health decision making. To better understand user needs, they will organize discussion groups with university students and youth in remote villages as well as meetings bringing together youth, mental health clinicians, and health ministry representatives.

Zainab Samad of Aga Khan University in Pakistan will incorporate sex and gender as a cross-cutting theme embedded in medical education in Pakistan at Aga Khan University and Khyber Medical University. They will perform a curriculum review across the two universities, engaging students, faculty, university leadership, and patients to understand the current teaching gaps related to sex and gender. This will guide development of a tool kit for incorporating the sex and gender theme across all years of training, with customizable strategies based on sociocultural context. They will implement a year-long pilot test of the program at the universities, integrating the theme into core subjects, including how different diseases are recognized and treated and how treatment decisions are made. Feedback from participants in the program will be incorporated into a road map to guide other medical schools in Pakistan in revising their curriculum.

Gautam Bhan of the Indian Institute for Human Settlements in India will provide technical support to Indian state governments to design, pilot, and test models for expanding the Integrated Child Development Services program to offer community-based childcare suitable for working women, particularly those in the informal economy. This will build on services already provided in the well-established community childcare centers known as Aganwadis. They will make the hours of operation suitable for informal women workers and extend services to include the needs of children from ages 0-6 years, including increased support for health checkups for mothers and their children, as well as additional support for supplementary nutrition and pre-school education. They will also develop processes to empower women's active participation in the program and increase the demand for the new services. The piloted models will be assessed for their impact on women and children's health and on women's economic participation and productivity.

Edita Magileviciute of the Caboverdean Ecotourism Association in Cape Verde will explore the potential of locally harvested seaweed as a biofertilizer to support rural women's livelihoods and agricultural development in Cape Verde. After women-led hand-harvesting, Sargassum and Ulva seaweed will be processed and tested for use as a safe and effective compost for vegetable crops. Testing will be in collaboration with local stakeholders and the University of York in the United Kingdom, who have assessed seaweed products in Jamaica. They will also explore dried Sargassum seaweed combined with recycled glass and plastic for production of building bricks, as well as Ulva seaweed as a food or additive to cosmetics. These seaweed-based products would provide new business opportunities for rural women, while contributing to rural agricultural development.

Gaurav Mehta of the Dharma life Foundation gGmbH in Germany  will establish Dharma Life Community Learning Centers in India that combine vocational training for mothers with early childhood care and education for their children to improve women's workforce participation, children's educational outcomes, and social acceptance of professional childcare. Training will include vocational courses based on demand in the local job market, and entrepreneurial opportunities will be provided, including linking to women who are starting businesses. They will compare outcomes for women and children in low-income populations in rural and semi-urban India in randomly selected villages with and without the Learning Centers. This comparison will be informed by three centers already operating as a pilot trial. Integrating vocational training with childcare in the Learning Center will accustom women to effective childcare while working, increasing their economic empowerment while broadening social norms around division of labor.

Issiaka Soulama of the Agence Nationale de Régulation Pharmaceutique (ANRP) in Burkina Faso will support national regulatory processes by enhancing the data systems with a package of improvements. The project is a collaboration with the Food and Drugs Authority in Ghana. They will implement training programs for staff to enhance the technical evaluation of marketing authorization applications and clinical trial protocols. For all pharmaceutical regulatory functions, they will define a framework for developing key performance indicators as well as develop and implement standard operating procedures for the production, collection, analysis, and dissemination of key statistics. They will also implement a digital and integrated information management system to support standardizing the regulatory data and connecting the relevant databases.

The National Drug Authority in Uganda will support national regulatory processes by enhancing the data systems with components that monitor key performance indicators. The project is a collaboration with the Uganda National Council for Science and Technology and with the Tanzania Medicines and Medical Devices Authority, who will help ensure that systems of both partners are interoperable across regulatory functions covering clinical trials, market authorization, and good manufacturing practices. They will design and then incorporate monitoring and evaluation modules into the regulatory information management system. The modules will track key performance indicators of the system, generating real-time reports as well as quarterly and annual reports on performance trends. This monitoring will facilitate evidence-based improvements in the process. It will also facilitate integration with other systems within the National Drug Authority, including a harmonized approach to data standardization.

The Food and Drugs Authority in Ghana will support national regulatory processes by enhancing the data systems with a package of improvements. The project is a collaboration with the Botswana Medicines Regulatory Authority. They will bolster processes across both agencies by deploying a standardized set of metrics and key performance indicators. This will include finalizing the implementation of integrated regulatory information management systems. These systems will be harmonized so that the two agencies can share reports following data capture and analysis. They will also share analytics tools and methodologies for deriving insights from data, including predictive modeling, trend analysis, as well as real-time monitoring to proactively address challenges that arise for the data systems.

Richa Verma of Siddhi Vinayak Agri Processing Private Limited in India will support women entrepreneurs and women-led Farmer Producer Organizations in adopting climate-resilient potato varieties through a pilot program in four states in India. They will collaborate with Friends for Women's World Banking to support farmers' access to financial services and guidance on marketing, and they will collaborate with Agrico (Netherlands) to support decisions on potato varieties. The pilot program will be established in the states of Uttar Pradesh, Assam, Bengal, and Gujarat. They will provide training and support that broadly encompasses the business of potato farming, ranging from marketing climate-resilient seed varieties to drone-based spraying of crops to post-harvest processes that add to the agricultural value chain.

Alexandre ten Caten of the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina with the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro in Brazil will pilot test an affordable field-based system for measuring biological nitrogen fixation (BNF) to guide BNF-based strategies to improve crop production. They will test their system in a field experiment including crops grown with either of two treatments: nitrogen-capturing microorganisms applied to seeds or nitrogen-fixing legumes grown with the crop. They will then assess BNF, comparing measurement of nitrogen isotopes by mass spectrometry as the benchmark to spectral measurements with more affordable spectrometers. They will use machine learning to integrate data from spectral analysis of soil with that of plant leaves to generate a model, which could be incorporated into a mobile app, for more accurate BNF monitoring. They will also develop an RNA-based diagnostic test to identify plant genotypes more responsive to nitrogen-fixing bacteria. These tools would enable agricultural extension workers and farmers to independently monitor new BNF-based strategies.

The Botswana Medicines Regulatory Authority in Botswana will support national regulatory processes by enhancing the data systems with a package of improvements. The project is a collaboration with the Ghana Food and Drugs Authority. They will bolster processes across both agencies by deploying a standardized set of metrics and key performance indicators. This will include finalizing the implementation of integrated regulatory information management systems. These systems will be harmonized so that the two agencies can share reports following data capture and analysis. The collaboration will include strengthening multiple regulatory functions in Botswana, including strengthening pharmacovigilance by incorporating procedures for monitoring activities for risk minimization and risk communication. It will also include strengthening clinical trial regulation by enhancing management of the review process from receipt of applications to post-approval compliance to final reporting.

Imran Zia of the Centre for Economic Research in Pakistan (CERP) with the National Incubation Center will establish an innovation hub to support startup companies in creating practical and accessible health solutions for women living in underserved and low-income communities in Pakistan. They will establish a physical hub that is integrated with an existing research network and uses a human-centered design approach with evidence-based decision-making throughout, from product conception to launch and scale-up. They will develop and implement an open-source curriculum tailored to entrepreneurs for women's health and incubate a cohort of startups. Participating startups will be selected through gatherings held at leading medical universities and through collaboration with other incubators. The hub will lead to improved women's health outcomes, while generating insights on the health needs of women in Pakistan that can help inform national health policy.

Junaid Iqbal of Aga Khan University in Pakistan will test the effects of daily supplemental feeding for women in rural Pakistan to mitigate the negative effects of heat stress during pregnancy on maternal and neonatal health outcomes. They will enroll 250 women, comparing pregnancy in the summer and winter and with and without daily supplemental feeding in the first trimester. The supplemental food will be designed for increased nutritional value, based on ingredients from local diets. They will measure a variety of clinical outcomes in mother and child, including maternal ultrasound measurements and newborn anthropometry. To explore potential mechanisms underlying the effects of heat stress and their potential mitigation by supplemental feeding, they will also use maternal samples taken at the time of delivery to assess serum micronutrients, the gut microbiome, and the placental transcriptome.

Kimberly Templeton of the University of Kansas Medical Center Research Institute in the U.S. will develop educational materials for healthcare providers and researchers on women's health, focusing on sex and gender influences on health. They will establish a virtual center for women's health education to develop, disseminate, and evaluate online teaching materials. These materials will be developed by experts in the field, with guidance from healthcare professionals in the country in which they would be used, and they will be created by partners in the United States, Nigeria, and Kenya initially as a proof of concept. The materials will provide practical, clinically relevant information encompassing common communicable, non-communicable, and chronic conditions across the life course, and they will be available on-line free of charge for a global audience.

Santu Ghosh of the St John's Research Institute in India will explore the effects of heat stress on lactation and infant growth, including their potential mitigation by a nutritional supplement for breastfeeding mothers in India. They will enroll two cohorts of 65 women in the state of Tamal Nadu, comparing data for breastfeeding in the summer versus the winter. They will measure breast milk quantity and quality, an oxidative stress marker in maternal blood, iron nutritional status in mother and infant, and infant growth. To test the hypothesis that heat stress causes harm via oxidative stress in mothers, they will assess the potential benefit of giving a subset of the breastfeeding mothers an omega 3-fatty acid nutritional supplement as an antioxidant. The results could guide simple strategies based on diet or nutritional supplementation to mitigate the effects of heat stress on the health of pregnant and lactating women.

Robert Gorkin of Western Sydney University in Australia will develop a clinically relevant qualitative measure of absorbency for menstrual health and hygiene products together with a digital tool incorporating this measure to help women self-identify when their menstrual bleeding requires clinical attention. They will conduct workshops to gather end-user requirements from consumers and clinicians, while defining target technical specifications. Collaborating with the company Enersol, they will evaluate the latest absorbency testing methods to establish a comprehensive testing methodology useful across pads, tampons, and period underwear. Incorporating this measurement system, they will develop a user-friendly digital diary for women to track their menstrual bleeding, guided by relevant existing web- and application-based tools. They will then perform a pilot trial at a clinic, comparing women with normal versus abnormal uterine bleeding, to assess the feasibility, acceptability, and clinical benefit of their menstrual health management system.

Nicki Tiffin and Tsaone Tamuhla of the University of the Western Cape in South Africa will model how infectious and non-communicable diseases interact to affect maternal, neonatal, and child health outcomes, using gestational diabetes as a case study. These interactions include those between multiple chronic conditions and multiple medications in individuals and those due to variable access to health care. They will develop risk factor models for gestational diabetes, harnessing Large Language Models for data harmonization and standardization. The models will be applied to mother and child clinical datasets held by collaborators across the Global South through a federated data analysis approach (joint analysis without sharing the data itself). This collaboration will generate new models and evidence for gestational diabetes outcomes. It will also establish guidelines more broadly for health data modeling to inform policy, while helping build a collaborative Global South data modeling community.

Daniel Muema of the KAVI Institute of Clinical Research, University of Nairobi in Kenya and Marit J. van Gils of the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands will characterize the B cell immune repertoire in defined African populations to inform the use of an HIV vaccine with a germline-targeted immunogen. This clinically advanced, HIV envelope glycoprotein immunogen, BG505 SOSIP GT1.1, is engineered to guide the development of naïve B cells to produce broadly neutralizing antibodies (bnAbs) against HIV. They will determine the baseline frequencies of bnAb-precursor naïve B cells and bnAb-like memory B cells that recognize this immunogen in uninfected, adult sex workers highly exposed to HIV and in adults living with HIV. This will determine if the immunogen will be effective in these populations for HIV prophylaxis and functional cure, informing the design of vaccine clinical trials.

Cleo Conacher of Stellenbosch University in South Africa will develop a surveillance and risk prediction system for the presence of Candida pathogens in river water sources used by informal settlements in South Africa. This system will account for climate change-influenced environmental factors that can affect the prevalence, distribution, and behavior of these fungal pathogens. They will survey community members for data on river water exposure. They will also design a sampling device to collect data on river water properties as well as microbiological samples for data on Candida pathogen prevalence and gene expression. They will combine this data to enhance an existing framework for microbial risk assessment and to develop an AI-based model that predicts fungal infection risk from environmental trends. They will communicate the risk estimates and overall conclusions to community members through meetings and a project website, with materials translated into relevant local languages.

Maria Jones of UN Women (India Country Office) in India with Umang Agarwal of GROW Indigo and Sudarshan Thakur of PRADAN, both in India will develop a sensor to measure biological nitrogen fixation (BNF) and provide it together with access to biofertilizers to women small-scale producers in India as a model of gender-intentional agricultural innovation. They will develop a low-cost sensor for real-time measurement of BNF in the field. They will conduct field trials with the sensor, using the data to generate a model that incorporates satellite imagery data to estimate BNF, and then validate the model with mass spectrometry data from the field trial. They will pilot test the sensor plus access to biofertilizers and training on complementary climate-smart agricultural practices with women small-scale producers in the state of Madhya Pradesh in India. This package of support could lead to improved soil health and crop productivity, increasing income as well as resilience to climate change.

Krina Zondervan of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom will characterize endometriosis in African populations to close knowledge gaps and inform the development of non-surgical diagnostics and therapeutics with global applicability. Endometriosis is a chronic inflammatory condition due to growth of endometrial-like tissue outside of the uterus, and it can cause pain and infertility. Working with local collaborators, they will collect endometriosis and related phenotypic data for women across South Africa, Ghana, and Kenya, with genetic data collected from a subset of women. They will identify women with confirmed endometriosis and collect phenotypic data through a globally standardized questionnaire. including the condition's impact on quality of life. They will perform genome-wide association analysis, investigate putative causal genetic variants to help uncover biological mechanisms, and hold meetings to inform and strengthen the collaboration network and plan future research.

Ousmane Sy of the Universite Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar in Senegal will develop mathematical and AI-based models to predict the impact of climate change on malaria morbidity, mortality, and transmission by the Anopheles gambiae species complex in Senegal. They will use epidemiological, environmental, and entomological data from the last 20 years in northern and central Senegal to predict the future of the disease in these areas. The models will incorporate the effects of interventions for malaria control being used in Senegal, including long-lasting insecticidal nets, indoor residual spraying with insecticides, and seasonal chemoprevention. The project's interdisciplinary approach will support the National Malaria Control Program, while building and strengthening collaborations for malaria modeling.

Blaise Bougnom of the Centre for Research in Infectious Diseases in Cameroon will develop models to predict the impact of climate change on the spread of clinically relevant, drug-resistant bacteria in maternity wards in Cameroon and Burkina Faso to enhance public health preparedness. The models will integrate climate data with data from hospitals across different climate zones in the two countries, enabled by a partnership with the University of Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso. They will collect and sequence bacterial samples from these hospitals, while also performing environmental monitoring in them. They will then collect historical and projected climate data for the relevant areas of the countries, using it to develop models that predict transmission of drug-resistant bacterial strains. Using the models, they will design targeted interventions, such as enhanced hygiene protocols, pilot testing them in hospitals to improve maternal and neonatal health outcomes.