Hello, and welcome to our blog!

Today is Monday, August 7th, 2023. This was the Ukweli 2023 team’s first full day in Sierra Leone, along with the rest of the Global Social Impact Fellowship groups. Our team members embarking on the trip are Reeza Chaulagain, Brooke Lee, and Sterling Salmini. We hope to be joined by Lorraine Rwasoka in the coming days.

Our home for the next nineteen days is the Makambo Village Resort, a comfortable compound with plenty of bedrooms, a dining hall, and–gratefully!–running water and electricity. Makambo Village Resort is located in Makeni, the largest city in Sierra Leone’s Northern Province, and capital of the Bombali district.

The day kicked off with an early wakeup and an 8:30am breakfast. Breakfast was a small pancake, a little omelet, bread, and a sausage. There was tea available to brew with hot water, as well as packets of instant coffee and powdered milk. Most everyone made their way to the dining hall by 9:00am. Teams had the opportunity to mingle and prepare for our work days–nobody was quite sure what to expect!

Two students collected cash from all teams to be exchanged and personally used over the next ten days. Another helped collect the numbers of everyone whose phone was unlocked and could use a SIM card. Two students, including Reeza, volunteered to be the transportation coordinators for the trip, taking the role of collecting team agendas and ensuring drivers were tuned to where they needed to be and when. A program-wide meeting was held at 10:00am. Professor Khanjan Mehta relayed the day’s agenda, gave insight into the day-to-day life and social expectations of Sierra Leone, and fielded all of our first-day questions. At 10:30am, it was time to head off to World Hope International!

World Hope International’s office in Makeni is lovely. The ride was our first daytime experience diving into Sierra Leonean life. Eight of us packed into a land cruiser which was actually quite comfortable, despite being squished together. Sierra Leoneans were out and about their marketplace and homes. There were motorbikes everywhere. The temperature was hot and humid, as it is most days, but the clouds cooled the city down a lot. Ukweli 2023 arrived at World Hope International’s office before everyone else. The gated office building is beautiful and sunny, with organization vehicles packed in the compound’s front lot. A big tree bedded with flowers shades the courtyard, and makes it extremely comfortable! Our team headed into the office, setting up at the desk, and spending the day there.

Ukweli is dedicated to saving the lives of women in Sierra Leone. Our 2023 team spent the spring semester navigating a new era in the project’s lifetime. Ukweli is divided into two subteams; Ukweli Test Strips and Cervical Cancer Research.

Ukweli Test Strips are affordable, accessible, and efficient urinary tract infection test strips that have been onboarded to fifty-six peripheral health units around Makeni and Sierra Leone’s Northern province. The Ukweli Test Strip subteam has developed a unique business model which allows each party involved in strips’ manufacturing, shipping, distribution, education, and use benefits to earn a living and help their community. The technology and launch effort goes back to 2017 and has been massively successful, with thousands of tests being administered.

Sterling and Cindy Tran have lead the Ukweli Test Strips subteam, creating an exhaustive business model, which plans the program’s expansion across all of Sierra Leone and into neighboring Liberia as well. Ukweli’s valued funder Grand Challenges Canada backed the test strips’ launch back in 2019; we have been invited to transition to scale. The multi-year journey to scale will make affordable urinary tract infection and preeclampsia test strips accessible to millions of women.

Although this subteam’s grant proposal writing and business model development are not the focus of our fieldwork this summer, our team will visit partnered peripheral health units across Makeni to assess the lasting demand, accessibility, and popularity of the Ukweli Test Strip.

The Cervical Cancer Research subteam is the more newly established sect of Ukweli. The subteam researches effective methods of cervical cancer screening implementation in low- and middle-income countries. Reeza and Lorraine have lead this team’s work through the semester. Surveying Sierra Leonean women’s awareness of cervical cancer and their perceptions of receiving human papillomavirus vaccination is an essential part of creating a repeatable, game-changing process for screening across low- and middle-income settings. This local surveying will make up the vast majority of our team’s fieldwork time this summer.

Our team spent the first part of the morning creating contracts for the translators we will need to conduct live interviews and transcribe audio recordings. We are still waiting on Institutional Review Board approval for our interview protocols, which will allow us to engage in fieldwork research with the women of Makeni. The approval will be on its way soon! We took the rest of the morning to develop an agenda for our fieldwork.

We estimate each interview will be around fifteen minutes, and take a minimum of a half hour to transcribe. Forty-five minutes for an interview’s conduction and transcription means we are looking at a maximum of nine to twelve completed interviews per day. We took this into consideration when developing our translator contract’s pay rate, and expectations for what an average day of intensive fieldwork may be like. Although we are uncertain of the actual interview dates, a day’s routine of early wakeup, translator hiring, and transportation coordination has been figured out.

We had a video call with Lorraine, who ran into international visa issues on the date of our departure flight. Lorraine spent the summer at Mountaintop, developing our fieldwork and interview protocols, making her (and a fellow student’s) travel complications especially detrimental. We miss her a bunch! Nevertheless, we coordinated with her and got the information we needed to prepare today.

Brooke finalized her list of crash course topics for the Artificial Intelligence Strengthening Healthcare Access team’s education tool. Brooke is developing one-hundred short courses that introduce and inform on essential health topics that can be accessed with AISHA’s technology in Amazon Alexa. She has been collaborating with their team for the whole semester, providing their entire database of questions, answers, information, and translations used for AISHA’s educational technology. She will be working alongside their team to create infographics that demonstrate the technology’s use this week as well.

Our team was introduced to everyone in the World Hope International office–everyone was incredibly kind, welcoming, and grateful for our presence. Likewise to them, it is through our amazing local partners that life-saving work is possible. The afternoon was spent planning and exploring local shops. Around 6:00pm, everyone finished up work and headed off to dinner. Our team got to ride in the back of a flatbed truck today to dinner! The breeze was lovely, and the locals were incredibly friendly and humored to see American college students packed together in a truck bed.

Dinner was the same as our last night’s arrival meal: rice, beans, cassava leaf stew, and bread. We’ll definitely get used to having these meals every day. It is delicious! After dinner, everyone headed back to the Makambo Valley Resort and freshened up before an 8:00pm debrief. Everyone had an exciting first day.

Tomorrow morning, Ukweli is going to interview and negotiate with translators. We are also going to fully familiarize ourselves with interview protocols and conduct mock interviews with friends, so we can get a comfortable feel for the flow and tune of our fieldwork. We are hoping to buy fruit from some street vendors as well!

Until tomorrow, yours truly,

Ukweli 2023