Ashesi University participates in global collaborations intent on transforming Africa, i.e., health, education, climate, etc. They include but are not limited to the reciprocal partnerships within the following:

• Africa Health Collaborative– Ashesi University, and each of the other eight universities in the consortium, has collected baseline data and created a plan for continuous data gathering and analysis of the collaborative’s impact on Health Employability, Health Entrepreneurship and the Health Ecosystems
• STOP NCDwhere we bring technology to prevent and monitor non communicable diseases in developing countries such as Ghana, Burkina Faso and Niger in West Africa (SDG 3).

Specifically, The Example of STOP NCD

Ashesi University is part of a global consortium engaged in a grant from the NIHR on the following:

Some summary information on the project that may be helpful:

STOP NCD is the acronym for “NIHR Global Health Research Center for NCD Control in West Africa”.  The Centre which is co-led by LSHTM and GCPS comprises a cluster of research and academic institutions in West Africa (Catholic University of West Africa in Bobo-Dioulasso Burkina Faso, LASDEL in Niamey Niger, Ashesi University in Brekusu Ghana, Ghana College of Physicians and Surgeons (GCPS) and UK (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM).

West Africa faces a rising burden of non-communicable diseases (NCD) such as hypertension, diabetes, and co-existing mental health disorders (stress, anxiety, and depression). Disease control priorities have been traditionally driven by the burden of communicable diseases, such as malaria. The region has been slowly responding to the increasing NCD burden, and most interventions addressed individual diseases rather than focus holistically on people. There is an urgent need for capacity to conduct high-quality research to inform effective, evidence-based and people-centered approaches to NCD control, adapted to West African settings.

We aim to:

• Improve health and wellbeing of populations in West Africa by developing capacity for high-quality research to inform improved prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of inter-connected NCDs (hypertension, diabetes and co-existing stress, anxiety, and depression).

To do this we will:

• Work in three West African countries (Ghana, Burkina Faso, and Niger) with varying ethnic-socio-cultural-economic environments to develop, implement and evaluate ways of improving control of hypertension, diabetes and related stress, anxiety, and depression.
• We will start by analyzing roles of key stakeholders (patients and communities, health workers, managers, policymakers) in the development, provision, and use of NCD policies, programmes, and services in each country, using appropriate methods such as analysis of available data, observations, and interviews.
• Working closely with those stakeholders, we will co-produce packages of interventions for improving NCD control. This package will include adapting international guidelines to local contexts and supporting healthcare workers in implementing these, and establishing a community-based prevention, early-detection, and management of NCDs.
• We will implement and rigorously evaluate the interventions packages for their costs and effectiveness, assess their potential for wide-scale application, and will identify transferable lessons for improving NCD control beyond these three countries.

Throughout these steps, we will:

• strengthen individual skills and expertise, organisational systems and processes and system-wide networking capabilities and leadership of researchers (to conduct high-quality research), local communities (to engage with, and understand, how to enable healthy lifestyles) and policymakers and practitioners (to implement evidence-based NCD interventions).
• engage with key stakeholders (patients, health workers, managers) for consulting on their views, preferences, and expectations, sharing results as they emerge and facilitating uptake of research results into their decisions and practices.
• maintain equitable international partnerships, through shared leadership involving both senior and earlier-career staff, and equally distributed management responsibilities.

Promoting the findings

Networking, prolonged engagements with, and deep understanding of, local communities and other stakeholders (for example, health workers, policymakers) will help promote research dissemination, communication, and uptake. This will include understanding stakeholder perspectives and proactively involving them in co-production, implementation and evaluation of interventions packages.

We will share research results with different audiences, through easy-to-understand leaflets, briefs, audio-visual materials, adapted guidelines, policy dialogues, academic publications, and conference presentations.

The Centre will work with policy practice and CSO partners including representation from persons living with NCD to ensure the applied relevance of the research and capacity building.