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Student's APHA Grant Supports Project for Orphans and Vulnerable Children "Eleven percent of primary school children in the Bungoma district in western Kenya are orphans due to HIV/AIDS," says Tova Reichel, a May 2007 graduate of the Department of International Health and Development. This means that nearly 9,000 children in this Kenyan district head households and are the primary caregivers of their siblings and ailing adult family members. These orphans and vulnerable children, says Reichel, don't receive the life skills necessary for healthy living and disease prevention that are usually encouraged and passed down by parents. In addition to the growing numbers of these children, diarrhoeal diseases already account for roughly 20 percent of under-five mortality in the district, and only 56 percent of Kenyans have access to safe water. The convergence of these child-oriented health problems in the Bungoma district led Reichel to apply for a research grant from the American Public Health Association (APHA) to promote positive hygiene practices among primary school children in the area. Reichel, a School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine student at the time, won the grant. This year, she was rewarded $10,000 to implement and evaluate a year-long project, focusing on these at-risk children in Bungoma. Reichel participated in a Tulane Payson Center course on monitoring and evaluation in Kenya in 2006. Afterward, she stayed in Bungoma to do more school work - this time, her "culminating experience," a graduation requirement for public health students. She interned at ACE Africa, and then was offered a full-time position with ACE to conduct process evaluations of their agriculture and nutrition program and to assist with proposal and report writing. Principal investigator duties of her new APHA-funded hygiene promotion project will be absorbed into her ongoing duties at ACE. "Several courses at Tulane," says Reichel, "helped prepare me for this project by providing me with the knowledge and skills necessary to design, implement, and evaluate a public health project emphasizing behavior change." Reichel singles out her courses in monitoring and evaluation, communications research, operation research, survey measurement, biostatistics, and grant writing. Reichel will present her project and research findings at the annual meeting of the APHA in 2008. In addition to encouraging orphans to adopt positive hygiene practices in their homes and in the care of their siblings, Reichel hopes her project will inform the greater Bungoma community, other NGOs, and policy makers as to which methods are effective for enacting behavior change in children who are unfortunately living in homes with no parents or adults. |