Facilitating factors and barriers to malaria research utilization for policy development in Malawi

BACKGROUND : Research on various determinants of health is key in providing evidence for policy development, thereby leading to successful interventions. Utilization of research is an intricate process requiring an understanding of contextual factors. The study was conducted to assess enhancing factors and barriers of research utilization for malaria policy development in Malawi. METHODS : Qualitative research approach was used through in-depth interviews with 39 key informants that included malaria researchers, policy makers, programme managers, and key stakeholders. Purposive sampling and snowballing techniques were used in identifying key informants. Interview transcripts were entered in QSR Nvivo 11 software for coding and analysis. RESULTS : Respondents identified global efforts as key in advancing knowledge translation, while local political will has been conducive for research utilization. Other factors were availability of research, availability of diverse local researchers and stakeholders supporting knowledge translation. While barriers included: lack of platforms for researcher-public engagement, politics, researchers’ lack of communication skills, lack of research collaborations, funder driven research, unknown World Health Organization policy position, and the lack of a malaria research repository. CONCLUSION : Overall, the study identified facilitating factors to malaria research utilization for policy development in Malawi. These factors need to be systematically coordinated to address the identified barriers and improve on malaria research utilization in policy development. Malaria research can be key in the implementation of evidence-based interventions to reduce the malaria burden and assist in the paradigm shift from malaria control to elimination in Malawi.University of Pretoria Institute for Sustainable Malaria Control (UP ISMC)http://www.malariajournal.comam2016School of Health Systems and Public Health (SHSPH

Photographs, railways, partition : domiciled Europeans in the later Raj

University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.This thesis focuses on an analysis of a family narrative that is imbricated with the development of two significant technologies of modernity: photography and the railways. Originally both were a product of and complementary to the colonial project which brought with it new experiences and, through the consequences of Partition, fashioned national identities. The subjects created by these technologies were represented in images captured in vernacular photographs. However, over time as technologies were deployed into everyday life their effects reflected the changes taking place in the wider context of colonial India. My account of this time weaves the core biography of Leslie Nixon into a wider historical context to create a narrative that is derived from texts, semi-structured photo elicitation interviews using vernacular photographs (taken between 1910 and 1947) of the domiciled European and Anglo-Indian communities who lived along the Great Indian Peninsula Railway line in late colonial India. During my research I found little or no mention of photography practiced at an everyday level by long term ‘settlers’ that recorded life outside major cities. My combined reading of family photographs acts as an articulation of and between private, less authorised discourses against (but not counter to) those of the colonial bureaucracy. This raised questions and challenges around how to use family photographs in interviews to elicit accounts of personal experiences of public and very traumatic events like the Partition. I interrogate the stories people tell when presented with an image that resonates with the past and unsettles the present. Through my account I argue that photographs, to some degree, reflect the increasingly unstable colonial boundaries of the day. In addition various accounts by Gurkha soldiers and British officers in the last part of British rule during the Partition contribute a different perspective to the Partition narrative. Engagement with new technologies reflects the way physical space was experienced and managed during the late Raj and the inevitable outcome of colonial rule in the mayhem of Partition