London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

Trigger warning: This session will deal with issues including gender and sexual violence and abuse which may be triggering to survivors.

This 16 Days introductory event will begin with an introduction of the organising LSHTM centres: Centre for Maternal, Adolescent, Reproductive, & Child Health (MARCH) and Gender Violence and Health Centre (GVHC). Speakers will then give an overview of what gender-based violence is and why it is important to public health, discussing current events in gender-based violence, and the research base on what we know about ‘What Works’ to prevent gender-based violence.  

 Programme 

12.45-13.15: Introduction to MARCH and GVHC 

Speakers

Dr Debra Jackson, Deputy Director, MARCH and Professor Takeda Chair in Global Child Health, LSHTM 

Professor Debra Jackson joined LSHTM as the Takeda Chair in Global Child Health and Deputy Director of the MARCH Centre in August 2020. Previously she held the position of Senior Health Advisor and Chief of the Implementation Research and Delivery Science Unit, Health Section, UNICEF, which focuses on maternal, newborn, child and adolescent health programme research, data and digital health. She also holds an appointment as an Extraordinary Professor in Public Health at the School of Public Health, University of the Western Cape, South Africa. Professor Jackson has qualifications in nursing, public health, epidemiology and biostatistics. 

Her recent research has focused on the prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV, infant feeding, birth registration, maternal and newborn health and community health workers. 

Dr Ana Maria Buller, Director, GVHC and Associate Professor in Social Science, LSHTM 

Ana Maria Buller is the Director of the Gender, Violence and Health Centre and Associate Professor in Social Sciences at LSHTM. Dr Buller has 18 years’ experience conducting mixed methods social science research, in the areas of gender-based violence, social norms change and women’s economic and social empowerment. 

Screening of videos

• MARCH 10 Year Challenge 
• The Founding of GVHC 

13.15-13.40: What is gender-based violence? Definitions, prevalence and interventions  

Speakers

Dr Ana Maria Buller, Director, GVHC, Associate Professor in Social Science, LSHTM

Dr Nambusi Kyegombe, Assistant Professor in Social Science of Adolescent Health, LSHTM 

Dr Nambusi Kyegombe is an interdisciplinary social scientist with 19 years' experience working in global health and development. Nambusi has skills in the evaluation of complex violence prevention interventions and research into the social and structural drivers of morbidity.  She has led the qualitative evaluation of several randomised trials in Uganda including a randomised controlled trial of the Good School Toolkit and a cluster randomised trial of SASA! – a community mobilisation intervention to reduce violence against women and reduce HIV-related risk behaviours. She has also led primary research on access to child protection for children with disabilities in Uganda and multi-site formative research on transactional sex and sexual abuse and exploitation of young people in Uganda as part of the Learning Initiative on Norms Exploitation and Abuse.   

Nambusi sits on the Steering Committee of LSHTM’s MARCH Centre on which she co-leads the A=Adolescents theme. She is a senior social science associate scientist of the LSHTM Medical Research Council/Uganda Virus Research Institute (MRC/UVRI) Unit in Uganda and a fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA).  She sits on the Research Ethics Board of LSHTM and is an Associate Editor for the journals Sexual and Reproductive Health Matters, and Frontiers in Reproductive Health. 

13.40 – 13.45: What’s coming next 

Closing remarks