We made it to Sierra Leone for fieldwork 2019!! Our team could not be more excited to be in Makeni to work on our social venture, Ukweli Test Strips – and with three new team members with us this time. We landed in sunny, humid Freetown late Sunday afternoon and after breezing through security and customs, we piled in to our vehicles and headed off to the hotel in Makeni. On the three-hour drive, we took in the lush greenery present on both sides of the highway, waving to children along the way and getting our first tastes of Sierra Leone cuisine at dinner before gearing up for our first day of work on Monday.

Today, we kicked off fieldwork with an orientation program at the World Hope International Makeni field office, led by Sylvester, the chief financial officer and his colleagues. After learning about WHI’s extensive programming, we met with Hassan, our translator whom we plan on employing as Ukweli’s distribution manager. We caught up on his work with Gabi, our field fellow in Sierra Leone for nine months, and ran through the first part of the instructor training he will be tasked to provide to Community Health Workers before certifying them to read and interpret our test strip which screens for UTIs and Preeclampsia. We also discussed important methods for data collection, identifying holes in our data of our target population and scheduling meetings at clinics for Tuesday. These clinic meetings will be especially key to understanding the state of the Community Health Worker system, given that funding expired without renewal for the program, as well as the validating the prevalence of Preeclampsia.

Another piece of today was planning for the week ahead to ensure we get going with training health workers to read and interpret our test strips as soon as we can. With the ultimate goal of establishing sustainable operations of our venture before leaving Sierra Leone, the training of health workers is a top priority so that pregnant women can receive accurate screening results as soon as possible to save lives. In our planning for the week ahead, we also have a meeting scheduled on Tuesday to meet with the District Ministry of Health in the Bombali district to learn more about their work and gather information about data in the region and how they envision health care and maternal health in Bombali moving forward.  Wednesday includes more visits to clinics, and we will need to revisit our operational strategies based on the state of the CHW program.

We can’t wait to advance the project and create IMPACT!