Awards

Tavpritesh Sethi of Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology Delhi in India will develop an AI-based platform for AMR surveillance and management across a broad network of public and private hospitals in India. The platform will extract weekly data on AMR from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi (AIIMS Delhi) hospital and the Max Healthcare hospital network, including patterns of antibiotic prescriptions across the network. It will use a federated data analysis approach (joint analysis without sharing the data itself), and they will develop and integrate AI-based models to identify and predict trends in AMR. They will also create applications driven by these models to widely and effectively communicate the analyses to healthcare professionals. This will support antibiotic stewardship and data-driven AMR management at both the local and regional levels.

Sai Raj Reddy of Daia Tech Private Limited in India will develop a program to increase access to health education and related resources for adolescent girls in rural areas of the Indian state of Karnataka. The program will be developed in partnership with the Karnataka Health Promotion Trust, building on their ongoing work with local schools, healthcare providers, community leaders, and government agencies. After engaging community members to understand the local context, they will develop resources for adolescent girls including life skills courses and health education workshops and pilot test the program in selected villages. They will integrate AI tools across the program to broaden participation and to broaden the range of health outcomes improved for adolescent girls.

Bruno Mmbando of Kampala International University in Tanzania will model the combined impact of malaria chemoprevention strategies and vaccines on the burden of childhood malaria in Africa. A modeling focus will be on determining the level of vaccine uptake at which chemoprevention strategies cease to be cost-effective in settings with moderate to high malaria transmission. Data modeling will include the short- and long-term effects of parasite antimalarial drug resistance on the combined impact of chemoprevention and vaccines. The multidisciplinary team will include data modelers, health economists, clinical trialists, and epidemiologists. They will work closely with malaria decision-making organizations, leading to tools and processes that better support the use of malaria data modeling to inform public health interventions.

This grant is funded by The Wellcome Trust.

Belehalli Pavan of Strideaide Private Limited in India will develop an AI-based platform to increase timely access to diagnosis and treatment for diabetic foot ailments. Early detection of peripheral neuropathy, peripheral arterial disease, and diabetic foot ulcers would enable interventions that reduce the need for limb amputation. The platform will build on their existing network of podiatry clinics located in a variety of public spaces. These clinics are staffed with a paramedic providing treatment guided by diagnostic tools including a foot mat with a plantar pressure sensor to help predict and assess foot-bottom ulceration. Existing and new digital data from these clinics will be used to build a diabetic foot registry, to improve automated assessment through AI-based analysis, and to train an LLM with a chatbot interface for clinical decision support across the podiatry clinics.

Amrita Mahale of ARMMAN in India will incorporate an LLM-based chatbot into the Kilkari mobile health service to answer questions about pregnancy and infant care. Kilkari currently provides weekly pre-recorded messages on preventive care, and it is implemented in partnership with India's Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. They will assess different available LLMs and train the best candidate with the Kilkari database of vetted content. They will pilot test the model with Kilkari users through WhatsApp, engaging users in Delhi and in the state of Jharkhand to encompass diverse participants spanning urban, rural, and tribal populations. The test will include regular surveys to measure the service's accuracy, relevance, and usability.

Mohanasankar Sivaprakasam of the Healthcare Technology Innovation Centre at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras in India will develop an AI-based platform to support diagnosis and report generation for endoscopic gastrointestinal exams. They will use curated datasets of annotated endoscopic images to develop an AI-based model for diagnosing gastrointestinal abnormalities, such as polyps and ulcers. The data will also be used to train a Large Language Model (LLM) to generate diagnostic reports of endoscopic exams including representative images and text descriptions. This will improve report quality and consistency for better diagnosis and more accurate, detailed patient records, with the report automation reducing the time and personnel required. Together, these platform components will improve patient care in gastroenterology, including more efficient care across more patients.

Ntombifikile Mtshali of Shout-It-Now with Elona Toska of the University of Cape Town, both in South Africa, will pilot test use of ChatGPT to provide information on sexual and reproductive health that helps young women and adolescent girls in South Africa make informed decisions and effectively access health services. They will test integration of the chatbot into Shout-It-Now's existing platforms: a tablet-based platform in mobile clinics staffed by young women and a mobile phone app. They will train ChatGPT to provide information on sensitive topics, including gender-based violence, HIV infection risk, and pregnancy, using existing materials and guided by a workshop with mobile clinic staff. Users' perception of the chatbot and the chatbot's effectiveness in increasing the use of health services will be assessed using on-line questionnaires and phone surveys across five demographically different districts.

Vijay Sai Trap of OnionDev Technologies Pvt. Ltd. in India will develop an AI-based platform to provide accurate and private automated answers to questions on sexual health and mental well-being for youth and women in rural India. They will generate a dataset of community-generated questions on these topics during a mental health awareness campaign in the Indian states of Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and Tamil Nadu. With the support of subject matter experts, they will add answers to these questions from the relevant literature. They will then create a master dataset of questions and answers, including translations using an existing LLM trained on local Indian languages. This dataset will be used to compare different AI-based models to identify the one best able to effectively answer questions on these sensitive topics.

Himanshu Sinha of the Indian Institute of Technology Madras in India will develop an LLM-based chatbot to provide personalized reliable guidance on antenatal care in multiple Indian languages, particularly for mothers without regular access to health care. The chatbot will use an open-source LLM and will be incorporated into a mobile phone application. The project will begin by surveying pregnant women seeking care in a variety of health care settings and across all three trimesters, asking them what features they would want in a pregnancy app. The LLM will be trained with information from textbooks, clinical manuals, government health resources, and guidelines from professional organizations. Initially the chatbot will function in Hindi and Tamil, with additional Indian languages to follow. The app will track pregnancy milestones and deliver relevant evidence-based advice.

Sean Stowell of Brigham and Women's Hospital in the U.S. will analyze the human antibody repertoires targeting microbes in the female genital track (FGT) to guide the design and use of live biotherapeutic products for bacterial vaginosis. They will use their microarray platform, consisting of an array of antigens from FGT microbes, to analyze genital tract samples from a cohort of women in an HIV drug clinical study in South Africa. They will define the association between FGT antibody levels and specificity with FGT microbial colonization and inflammation. They will also perform experiments to explore potential mechanisms for antibody-mediated microbial attachment and colonization, focusing on antibody interactions with FGT mucin proteins. Together, the results will set the stage for using the microarray platform to identify patient-specific variables as biomarkers to predict the success of live biotherapeutic products.

Saliou Fall of the Institut Senegalais de Recherches Agricoles in Senegal will develop techniques to estimate biological nitrogen fixation (BNF) by legume crops to guide their use as alternatives to nitrogen fertilizers for more sustainable agriculture. They will assess BNF by estimating three underlying components. Crop biomass and the proportion that is nitrogen will be estimated by AI-based models, and the nitrogen fraction that comes from BNF will be estimated by measuring the levels of a stable isotope of nitrogen in the soil and in the plants. As test crops for data to train the AI models, they will grow groundnut and cowpea as staple legumes, with an adjacent non-nitrogen-fixing crop, and crotalaria as a cover crop. They will acquire images of the crops from drones or mobile phone applications, and perform laboratory analyses, including measuring biomass, analysis by near-infrared spectroscopy and wet chemistry, and measuring the natural isotope of nitrogen.

Daniel Kwaro of CREATES in Kenya will develop an early warning system for malaria outbreaks, floods, and heatwaves in Siaya County in Kenya, co-designing it with the local community. They will incorporate health and demographic surveillance system data, including a specific focus on maternal health indicators and birth outcomes, as well as data from automated weather stations, wearable devices, and mosquito traps. Through secondary data analyses, they will assess the probability and consequences of climate-related hazards, including identifying vulnerable communities, high-risk geographical areas, and occurrence patterns of climate-sensitive diseases. They will actively involve Siaya County residents, healthcare providers, and relevant local authorities in co-designing the early warning system paired with multiple mechanisms for communication to ensure the system is accessible and effective in responding to local needs.

Smit Gade of the Good Business Lab Foundation in India will perform a study in India to better understand the constraints for working mothers in accessing employer-provided childcare and the effects of increasing uptake of this childcare on working mothers and their children. They will perform a randomized controlled trial, recruiting sewing machine operators at a garment factory and unemployed women that will be offered job interviews at the factory. The factory offers free on-site childcare, but uptake is low. The trial arms will test the effect of subsidizing the cost of traveling with children to work, of providing information on the quality of the free creches at the factory, or of both combined. They will determine if the study treatments increase working mothers' uptake of childcare services and encourage unemployed women to interview for work. Trial outcome measures will include assessment of women's quality of life and of their children's welfare.

Anurag Agrawal of Ashoka University in India will develop an LLM-based platform to support medical decision making by home healthcare workers in India who are meeting the growing demand for home-based palliative care. The platform will use an existing proprietary LLM to extract and summarize relevant clinical information, connecting it with an existing open-source AI chatbot to generate advice in a conversational format for healthcare workers. They will test the platform using a dataset they will build of palliative care scenarios, focused initially on care for lung diseases, and they will compare outputs from several different open-source LLMs to guide the platform's final configuration. Expert clinicians will evaluate the clinical advice generated by the platform for its factual accuracy and relevance to the Indian sociocultural context.

Aline Rocha of Fiocruz in Brazil will link datasets through the Center for Data Integration and Knowledge in Health (CIDACS) to measure the impact of extreme climate events on maternal and infant nutritional outcomes across diverse ecological settings and population groups in Brazil. They will integrate longitudinal data from two datasets, the 100 Million Brazilian Cohort and the Climate and Health Data Platform, connecting them through the municipality where mothers reside. The cohort database links data from social protection programs to administrative and health databases to assess the social determinants of health. The data platform extracts and links climate and environmental data from the year 2000 onwards from existing open-source databases. The integration of these two datasets will guide evidence-based programs to enhance the resilience of health services and mitigate the effects of climate change on maternal and child health, particularly for those most vulnerable.

This grant is funded by Grand Challenges Brazil.

Livia Casseb of Evandro Chagas Institute in Brazil will develop models to understand and predict the impact of climate change on the Aedes mosquito-transmitted arboviral diseases dengue, chikungunya, and Zika in Brazil. The models will integrate a variety of existing data for the different geographic regions of Brazil, including historical data on climate, landscape characteristics, population density, mosquito distribution, and public health. They will also incorporate structured and unstructured data from community networks, teaching and research institutions, and state government entities. The models will reveal interdependent relationships and interactions, including spatial correlations between the arboviral diseases over time. They will develop distinct models for individual geographic regions to serve as early warning systems for arboviral disease outbreaks and to guide local interventions.

This grant is funded by Grand Challenges Brazil.

Hernan Argibay of Fiocruz in Brazil will support a participatory research approach for communities in urban slums in Salvador, Brazil to develop and monitor the impact of interventions to reduce the risk of vector-borne and zoonotic diseases. Guided by local needs, new community-led projects will focus on environmentally transmitted diseases (e.g., leptospirosis and enteric infections) and vector-borne diseases (e.g., leishmaniasis, rickettsiosis, and those caused by the arboviruses dengue, chikungunya, and Zika), all of whom could increase in incidence due to climate change. Intervention projects will include environmental clean-up to reduce disease transmission by mosquitos and rats, planting to improve drainage and provide additional food sources, and using an app to map potential risk factors and guide new projects. They will measure intervention impact, including community-led pathogen surveillance using vector traps, water sampling, and metagenomic sequencing.

This grant is funded by Grand Challenges Brazil.

Andréia Santo of the Associação Redes de Desenvolvimento da Maré in Brazil will collect temperature, humidity, and air quality data together with associated health data for residents in the Maré favelas in Rio de Janeiro to better understand the causes of respiratory diseases and reduce their burden. They will also train high school girls as citizen scientists to work alongside health professionals in collecting and analyzing data and developing practical technologies to mitigate the health effects of heat and poor air quality. This participatory science approach will serve as a sustainable mechanism to understand the impacts of climate change on the health of particularly vulnerable communities in Brazil and to guide the development of innovative solutions. In selected residences in Maré, they will pilot an intervention consisting of a bio-concrete wall coating to reduce indoor relative humidity as a cause of heat stress for occupants.

This grant is funded by Grand Challenges Brazil.

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.

Corine Ngufor of the Centre de Recherche Entomologique de Cotonou in Benin will evaluate insecticide-based strategies that can complement insecticide-treated bed nets for improved malaria control. In the laboratory, they will test the killing ability of combinations of insecticides, using pyrethroid-susceptible as well as pyrethroid-resistant laboratory-maintained mosquitoes. In experimental hut trials, they will test different strategies, including a combination of a spatial repellent (a transfluthrin passive emanator) with dual active-ingredient bed nets that are two years into their three-year product lifespan. They will also use hut trials with controlled release of insecticide-susceptible and -resistant mosquitoes to determine how different strategies are affected by resistance and by environmental factors such as temperature and humidity. Data modeling will be performed to assess the relative importance of different variables, helping identify the most effective insecticide-based strategies to accomplish malaria control goals.

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.

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.