Blessing MBeru, PhD

Conversations on Urban Health - Dr Yonette Thomas

Dr. Blessing MBeru is an ISUH Board member and a lead for the Africa Workgroup. In this podcast, Dr. MBeru believes that his role on the board is to help deepen ISUH’s role and work in Africa where urbanization is a major demographic event that creates many challenging issues related to health. The growth of urban informal settlements has created a number of population health challenges. Blessing sees ISUH’s focus on urban health as an important organizing hub for reaching the African continent and can bring greater relevance and value to what is happening in urban health. Dr. MBeru is anxious to help engage African thinkers and doers in urban health as members of ISUH. Africa has a lot of complexities as a continent of 54 independent countries. He is particularly interested in engaging existing observatories such as the Nairobi Urban Health Demographic Observation platform, including the one in Burkina Faso, in the development of an ISUH-Africa Urban Health Observatory. He sees researchers as the link to the local communities. His organization, APHRC, is a pan-African research center that has regional reach and can work with ISUH to connect with practitioners and policymakers. Dr. MBeru thinks it is important to create a mapping and measurement tool for community indicators on urban health. It will be a very important opportunity for greater collaboration and engagement of practitioners in the region as well as global engagement. The APHRC has a consortium for engaging African researchers that can be used to support this effort. There are many opportunities for partnering with APRRC that will enable ISUH to extend its reach in Africa. Particularly, the opportunity to engage emerging urban health researchers in the region and can create a broader link to universities across the continent.