Megan Bontempo
Since graduating from the MCAH program in May 2018 I have been working as a design researcher with YLabs, a global adolescent health and design firm focused on promoting the health and financial futures of young people around the world. I connected with YLabs during my summer internship which was supported in no small part by the generosity and encouragement of MCAH program faculty who understand that, especially as concerns maternal and adolescent health, global is local and local is global.
Design research is a unique methodology that combines practices across disciplines from ethnography, community based participatory research, and behavioral economics. At Ylabs I have been able to apply my quantitative training toward the development of new evaluation techniques that bring an added layer of scholastic rigor and evidence to our work.
Over the summer I was part of a team conducting exploratory research around HIV self-testing for young men in Kisumu--a hyper-endemic county with Kenya’s third highest (19.3%)1 HIV prevalence. We began with two weeks of in-depth interviews with young men and key stakeholders. We then synthesized our findings with local partners and conducted co-design sessions to produce low-fidelity prototypes of our proposed solutions.
The young men we spoke with emphasized the need for wrap-around support services that could enable them to imagine living healthful successful lives, even after diagnosis. Our early solutions looked at opportunities for integrating self-testing within community-based, economic empowerment programs that link health with wealth. While this work is ongoing, early findings suggest that young men are enthusiastic about the opportunity to be involved in creating a new market for HIV self-testing in Kenya.
1. DHS. Kenya Demographic and Health Survey. 2014.
