Health Initiatives

This first session in partnership with the Kenya Alliance of Resident Associations and the Center for Sustainable Development at the Earth Institute in a two-part series that takes a hard look at Kenya’s Urban Transportation Infrastructure in an age of climate change. This session discussed the state of NMT infrastructure in Kenya. 

From this event, we will hear from a public health student, GBV researcher and expert, and legal expert about public health and legal approaches to GBV interventions in Kenya.

Every evening during the early days of the pandemic, people opened their windows at a set hour to applaud the heroic women and men who were putting their health on the line in the fight against Covid-19. In New York, London, Madrid and other cities, it became something of a ritual. For me, it was a daily reminder of those invisible workers, the public health professionals who battle the pandemic behind the scenes. It was also a reminder of how now, more than ever, we must invest in public health.

Lockdowns and physical distancing have proved crucial to slowing the spread of Covid-19 in the short term, but looking to the future these measures are unsustainable and have caused a lot of social and economic damage. As the race for the vaccine continues experts are now focused on improving testing, tracing and treatment efforts, especially in Africa, where life-threatening gaps exist.  

Understanding the epidemiology of Covid-19 and moving forward would be critical to determining policy on the need to adopt interventions, including the Covid-19 vaccines that are being developed.

Finding the balance between limiting disease transmission, maintaining access to critical services and supporting livelihoods is the public health challenge of this century.

There is a need to consolidate global efforts to control and manage highly pathogenic agents like SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19). The legal framework under development by Africa-CDC will address this by assigning government agencies to regulate research activities that include high-consequence pathogens, and to ensure ethical boundaries are not breached.

Never before has the public had an opportunity to see, in glaring detail, the difference good governance makes. As Covid-19 spreads across the globe, we witness how different leaders address the same crisis. Some have the skills, qualities and appetite required to best guide their countries through the crisis, while others demonstrate their incompetence on a near-daily basis.

This was the first panel of a two-part panel series hosted by the Columbia Global Centers| Nairobi and Columbia Global Centers| Mumbai. The purpose of this series was to discuss lessons learned from India, Kenya and the United States in finding innovative ways to provide in-person and virtual clinical and outreach services in dental healthcare delivery during this pandemic. 

The purpose of this panel discussion was to bring together mental health experts living and working in informal settlements to discuss mental health in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic and to provide recommendations for managing and mitigating mental health challenges in these communities.

From this webinar on ‘Frontline Nurses: Leaders in Pandemic Response’ you will get to hear the voices of the Ebola nurses, understand their insights, and consider the implications for all of us today in the battle against COVID-19.

This special webinar on 'Africa Confronting Covid- 19' held on April 22^nd 2020 at 3:00 pm GMT was co- hosted by ICAP at Columbia University and Columbia Global Centers| Nairobi together with Columbia Global Centers| Tunis

The Workshop was an opportunity for the team of forty nutritionists to gain and share policy and health projects in the line of nutritional care for children with cancer in the African region.

Children are a key constituent of any society.  In the event of national scale-emergencies, hospitals, and medical institutions in Sub-Saharan Africa do not have a standard protocol, capacity to mitigate as well as the resources to ensure children receive the stipulated and adequate care.

The session was an opportunity for key Africa’s researchers, academia, and development partners to share existing science, policy, and health projects in the region, identify linkages, and explore future collaborations to combat air pollution in the region

On August 17^th and 18^th, Columbia Global Centers Nairobi hosted a PGIF Workshop by Drs' Phillip Larussa, Wilmot James and Lawrence Stanberry - which involved a Pediatric Leaders from Sub-Saharan Africa.  Participants were from Ethiopia, Malawi, Rwanda, South Africa, Lesotho, Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia, Mozambique, Ghana, and Liberia.

The goal of this meeting was to assemble key African pediatric leaders in the academic, government and not-for-profit sectors to discuss Global Health Security Agenda issues as they relate to the child and adolescent.

On July 11, 2018, Columbia Global Centers hosted a Kenya/Brazil oral health learning laboratory workshop on opportunities for addressing Challenges in Oral Health and dental care.  The workshop brought together stakeholders from government, private and public institutions.  Each stakeholder brought a wealth of experience and provided opportunities for knowledge-sharing. 

The rare opportunity – the first in Africa – is a major collaboration with Columbia University. The ANSRC is a partnership that brings together academic and research institutions across the East African region with the goal of building a PhD training programme in basic research in nutritional and agriculture science. The main aim is to address food insecurity in the region and raise the number of trained manpower in the selected fields of study across East African universities.

Strengthening the capacity of East African universities to train PhD and post-doctoral academics in areas such as human nutritional sciences, agriculture, technology, engineering and mathematics is urgently needed to develop local scientific capacity and help the region to achieve its development goals. 

The consortium is being facilitated by Professors Richard Deckelbaum and Debra Wolgemuth of the Institute of Human Nutrition at Columbia University, Dr. James Ntambi, professor of Biochemistry and Nutrition at the University of Wisconsin, and Dr. Bonnie Dunbar, adjunct professor at the University of Nairobi. The Institute has established a coordinating office for this program at Columbia University’s Columbia Global Centers | Africa (Nairobi), under the direction of the East Africa Coordinator and Kenyan native, Dr. Murugi Ndirangu.

Columbia Global Centers | Nairobi, hosted “Moving the Agenda Forward for Nursing and Midwifery Clinical Research in Southern and Eastern Africa”, on July 8th – 9th, 2015 in Nairobi Kenya. Partners included:

Columbia Global Centers | Nairobi hosted the first ever regional Oral Health Summit that was held from 23 to 24 March 2016. The summit was hosted under a collaborative partnership between the Columbia University Medical Center, University of Nairobi, School of Dental Science and Unilever Africa, to address the topic; “Integration of Oral Health and Health”.

“There is a generation of Somalis that is lost, due to the war. They have never seen a peaceful Somalia. This is dangerous for the entire world, when you consider that there are 9 million people that know only war and violence – how can you work together as a country to stop the fighting?”

Teledentistry – short for telemedicine in dentistry – uses digital and telecommunication technology to support long-distance health care, patient and professional health education, public health and health administration. This emerging technology includes wand-like cameras lighter than electric toothbrush, along with videoconferencing and streaming media.

CGC | Africa was proud to host the team of the African Migration and Development Policy Centre (AMADPOC) in Nairobi, Kenya, headed by Professor John O. Oucho, PhD, on Monday 27 January 2014, as part of the E-Conference on the Health Consequences of Migration, hosted online across the Columbia Global Centers and the Columbia Population Research Center in New York.

The African Nutritional Sciences Research Consortium (ANSRC) held a two-day workshop in Nairobi, Kenya, on the 24th to 25th January 2013. In total, 43 participants attended the ANSRC workshop, with regional representation drawn from Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda, and also from Tunisia (ADB representatives), USA and Italy.