On Thursday, 16 October, AHRI hosts a special public lecture: “The AHRI HDSS at 25: reflections on its foundations and future.”
In 1997, a bold vision took root in rural KwaZulu-Natal – to confront the HIV epidemic and build lasting scientific capacity. At the centre of that effort was the formation of AHRI’s health and demographic surveillance system (HDSS).
Prof Geoff Solarsh, who was instrumental in its founding, reflects on the HDSS’ origins, its impact over 25 years, and its future direction.
Speaker: Professor Geoff Solarsh
Respondent: Dr Natsayi Chimbindi
Date: Thursday, 16 October
Time: 5 for 5.30pm – 6.30pm
Join us! Stream the lecture live via YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTJ8D1rGl3M
About the talk
In the autumn of 1997, the Wellcome Trust announced that a consortium of researchers from the (former) Universities of Natal and Durban-Westville and the South African Medical Research Council had been selected from multiple competing research groups across sub-Saharan Africa to establish a centre for population studies and reproductive health in the Hlabisa health district on the eastern seaboard of South Africa. The primary mandate of this international research centre was to conduct studies that would impact on the burgeoning HIV/Aids epidemic and train a cohort of researchers that would amplify its impact throughout the subregion. The initial grant of £5 million left no doubt about their high expectations. At the very heart of this ambitious undertaking was the establishment of a population platform that would bring 75,000 people in the Hlabisa district under continuous surveillance and generate longitudinal trends in the demographic, social, economic and health status of this population. It would also serve as a research platform for a number of HIV and related reproductive health interventions. In this talk, we aim to tell the story of its founding principles and the painstaking efforts to create a centre that would genuinely make a difference to the unrelenting progress of this devastating epidemic and, in doing so, ensure that our host communities would be amongst its primary beneficiaries. We also aim to interrogate, with the assistance of the current group of AHRI researchers, the extent to which we have honoured these high aspirations in the past 25 years.
Prof Geoff Solarsh is a community paediatrician with a special interest and career-long involvement in the design and implementation of community-based medical education and population-based child health programmes in underserved populations. As principal investigator on a project to build a HDSS that would serve as a population platform for a suite of HIV-related interventions, he helped lay the foundation for an international research programme that, over 25 years, has evolved into the current Africa Health Research Institute (AHRI).
Dr Natsayi Chimbindi is an implementation research scientist with an interest in school-based interventions. She is a faculty member and a Wellcome Trust International Training Fellow at AHRI and an honorary associate professor at the Institute of Global Health at University College London. She has led major mixed-methods evaluations of complex HIV prevention interventions among young people, including of the PEPFAR-funded DREAMS project. Her research interests are in co-developing and evaluating theoretically derived interventions to deliver sexual health and HIV prevention interventions at schools.