BACKGROUND The global increase in the burden of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) underscores an urgent need for data on factors involved in generation and spread of TB drug resistance. We performed molecular analyses on a representative sample of Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB) isolates. Basing on findings of the molecular epidemiological study in Kampala, we hypothesized that the pre...

background vertically oriented global health initiatives (ghis) addressing the hiv/aids epidemic, including the president’s emergency plan for aids relief (pepfar), have successfully contributed to reducing hiv/aids related morbidity and mortality. however, there is still debate about whether these disease-specific programs have improved or harmed health systems overall, especially with respect...

LADDER is a research project funded by the Policy Research Programme of the UK Department for International Development (DFID) that seeks to identify alternative routes by which the rural poor can climb out of poverty. LADDER is working with nearly 40 villages and 1,200 households in Uganda, Tanzania, Malawi and Kenya to discover the blocking and enabling agencies in the institutional environme...

BACKGROUND Achieving maternal mortality reduction as a development goal remains a major challenge in most low-resource countries. Saving Mothers, Giving Life (SMGL) is a multi-partner initiative designed to reduce maternal mortality rapidly in high mortality settings through community and facility evidence-based interventions and district-wide health systems strengthening that could reduce dela...

BACKGROUND Knowledge is scarce about the impact of stroke in Uganda, and culturally adapted, psychometrically tested patient-reported outcome measures are lacking. The Stroke Impact Scale 3.0 is recommended, but it has not been culturally adapted and validated in Uganda. OBJECTIVE To culturally adapt and determine the psychometric properties of the Stroke Impact Scale 3.0 in the Ugandan conte...

The critical first step for the regionalization analysis was to use the description of the Kenya smallholder dairy environments and extrapolate those conditions over Uganda and Tanzania. This kind of evaluation of other countries would not have been possible using the traditional Jaetzold and Schmidt agro-ecological zone map as their zonation scheme was designed specifically for Kenya and was n...

BACKGROUND Intravaginal practices (IVP) are highly prevalent in sub-Saharan African and have been implicated as risk factors for HIV acquisition. However, types of IVP vary between populations, and detailed information on IVP among women at risk for HIV in different populations is needed. We investigated IVP among women who practice transactional sex in two populations: semi-urban, facility wor...

BACKGROUND Overweight and obesity are on the rise in developing countries including sub-Saharan Africa. We undertook a four-country survey to show the collective burden of these health conditions as they occur currently in sub-Saharan Africa and to determine the differences between urban and rural populations and other socio-economic factors. METHODS Participants were nurses in two hospitals ...

PREFACE This is the first draft of a study on the NGO sector commissioned by the Office of the Prime Minister of Uganda. To our knowledge, it is the first study of its kind in the developing world. The idea of a study of the NGO sector in Uganda was first proposed by a group of NGOs during the preparation of the first Poverty Reduction Support Credit (PRSC), the aim of which is to improve publi...

Background Although there is a general agreement on the benefits of evidence informed health policy development given resource constraints especially in Low-Income Countries (LICs), the definition of what evidence is, and what evidence is suitable to guide decision-making is still unclear. Our study is contributing to filling this knowledge gap. We aimed to explore health policy actors’ views r...