Women relying on old school skills to excel in science

Just one in four researchers in Kenya are women, Unesco data shows, a slight increase from the 23 per cent in 2010.

The numbers are even lower in medical sciences, at just 20 per cent. During the Covid crisis, many studies even reported that women published fewer papers and led fewer clinical trials. Yet, despite the disappointing studies, female scientists in Kenya have shepherded the country through a difficult time of the pandemic.

As the world marks International Day of Women and Girls in Science, female scientists such as Rosemary Njogu and Winfred Oluoch have relied on experience, training and gut feeling to work with the Ministry of Health to reduce Covid-19 fatalities.

As a public health specialist at Jhpiego—an international health organisation affiliated to the John Hopkins University—Ms Njogu worked with the government on the Covid-19. At the onset, she led a project that distributed and taught health workers to operate a portable type of ventilators in the wards and the intensive care units.

Life-saving interventions

As many health workers became sick with Covid-19, Ms Njogu spent most of her time training them in life-saving public health interventions such as proper donning of personal protective equipment. Her nursing experience and postgraduate training in public health and community development came in handy.

“As a nurse, you know patients: you are the first person to see patients, spend the most time with them when they are recuperating, and also update the other health workers in the hospitals about the patients’ progress. Community health development teaches you what brings the patients to the facilities from their homes. In responding to a pandemic, you must combine the clinical and the social,” she explains.

Covid-19 was not her first rodeo and she could almost predict little but monumental misses. Rosemary had worked on preventing the transmission of HIV from mothers to children in Kenya for most of her career. Health specialists often exclude pregnant women in trials, yet pregnant women are often hardest hit. Therefore, she led the study of Covid-19 vaccines on pregnant women but was more futuristic.

“The Maternal Immunisation study is not just for Covid-19 but to prepare the health system and workers so that they are never excluded in vaccination programmes in the future again,” Rosemary says.

Staying the course

Like Ms Njogu, Ms Oluoch has interacted with patients in and out of the facility and relied on her clinical experience and social work with Homa Bay County Health Department to keep malaria services going during the pandemic.

Winfred is a technical officer at Jhpiego and works with the Ministry of Health in Western Kenya and Nyanza to ensure health workers can diagnose and treat Malaria. As a clinical officer in areas with a high burden of malaria, she learnt that sometimes it was not the malaria parasite that would kill under-fives but the other conditions such as anaemia.

As patients stayed away from hospitals because of Covid-19, Winfred saw children brought to the facility in places like Mbita in Homa Bay County with parasites as high as 300,000 per microlitre blood.

Ms Oluoch, who is also a trained sociologist and psychologist, said: “I knew the children would die of anaemia, for example, if the only treatment they get is for malaria. So I would teach health workers to investigate and manage those other symptoms as well.”

They may not be vocal about it, but Rosemary, Winfred, and Jeannette Dawa have had to surmount considerable challenges specific to women to thrive in science, ranging from structural, societal and personal. For example, a study from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) showed how men and women faculty alike often chose the male CVs and left the female ones when presented with literally identical CVs.

Personal competence

Dawa, a PhD in modelling for infectious diseases and a medical doctor, learnt to find strategies to manage them, such as academic and personal competence. This strategy is popular among female scientists. An African Academy of Sciences study showed that personal capabilities ranked the highest (over 60 per cent) in what motivated women to pursue and stay in science. Academic preparation and parental influence followed closely at 25 per cent.

After her bachelor’s in medicine at the University of Nairobi, Dr Dawa pursued a public health degree focusing on the developing world at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in the United Kingdom.

“You learn many things in a public health training, and it also teaches one what a country would need in the face of a pandemic,” Dr Dawa said.

Later, Dr Dawa came back to the country to pursue her PhD in modelling and worked in various institutes like the Kenya Medical Research Institute (Kemri). All the knowledge she amassed and the times she tested them before Covid-19 in less scary smaller disease outbreaks. During the pandemic and now working as a research lead at Washington State University in Kenya, Dr Dawa was part of the Covid-19 modelling team. Modelling—a skill using mathematical equations to understand how a virus spreads within a population while mimicking reality by considering access to healthcare and the public health measures in place—is a powerful tool for disease control. During the pandemic, modelling guided the government to make critical decisions such as whether to institute a lockdown or not.

“We predicted how bad the pandemic could be, what resources the country and the counties would need in the worst-case scenario,” said Dr Dawa.

Preparations

In her recollection, the thought was that modelling was important and needed for a pandemic alongside other public health measures. In 2015, Dr Dawa was working at the Unit of Clinical Infectious Diseases at the University of Nairobi when the Ebola scare rocked the country.

“When that happens, and you are a health worker, you work with the government to respond, and that is what I did,” Dr Dawa explains.

Dr Dawa worked with other scientists and the Ministry of Health to prepare the guidelines for managing an Ebola patient and how the health system would respond to the immediate and long-term needs of the patients in case of an Ebola outbreak in Kenya.

Then, applying the same logic using your knowledge to prepare for the worst and hope for the best, Dr Dawa and her colleagues at the Washington State University Global Health Kenya researched just how many people in Nairobi had been exposed to the virus by November 2020.  The results of this study showed that some pockets of the city are more vulnerable, and it guided the Ministry of Health to know where to direct the most attention and resources.

Successful scientists—success here is satisfied with their job, are respect for their expertise and in some senior-level position according to conversations with scientists—say they needed some qualities not related to their technical skills. These included confidence and the courage to claim and own one’s ideas. Dr Dawa has added to this list, nurturing and tapping into peer networks.

“PhD teaches the process of answering a question when you have it, and getting that answer would be either you build the skills, or you collaborate with those who have it,” said Dr Dawa.

Names of some scientists she holds in high regard and taught her, like Prof Maritim, punctuate her conversations. Dr Dawa is also one of the founding officials of the Infectious Diseases Society of Kenya.

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