Desire Habonimana

I am a Senior Lecturer at the University of Burundi’s Department of Community Medicine within the Medical School and Honorary Visiting Research Fellow (HVRF) in Tropical Medicine at the Nuffield Department of Medicine, University of Oxford, where I belong to the Health Systems Collaborative (HSC) research team.

I will use The Wellcome Trust Early Career Research Fellowship to develop a Health Data Intelligence System (HDIS) for maternal and newborn health (MNH) in Burundi, one of the world’s poorest countries where routine surveillance remains weak and decision making constrained by missing, incomplete, or unreliable data. I will design, implement, and test a practical model for capturing community and facility data together beginning in one rural district (Rutana) where mortality is among the highest nationally, strengthen local data governance and translate data into action for MNH.

This work will integrate with existing national health information systems (OpenClinic and DHIS2) to enable continuous monitoring across the continuum of care. To make this sustainable, my fellowship will build formal institutional agreements between the University of Burundi’s Medical School (my base), its Institute of Digital Technology, and the Ministry of Health’s HMIS, clarifying roles for data hosting, security, ethics, and analytic capacity. 

The pilot will be guided by a programme theory and will be designed to enable the future deployment of large language models (LLMs) for patient and provider decision support (e.g., obstetric risk stratification and follow-up of newborns at high risk), ensuring these tools are grounded in locally governed, high quality MNH data. This work reflects my long-term career goal to strengthen equitable MNH care in Burundi through locally led public health innovation, rigorous evidence, and trustworthy data systems.