Dr Nambusi Kyegombe
MSc PhD FHEA
Assistant Professor
Social science of adolescent health
LSHTM
15-17 Tavistock Place
London
WC1H 9SH
United Kingdom
I am an interdisciplinary social scientist with 17 years of experience working in global health and development. I have a development studies background and a keen interest in the bi-directional relationship between health and poverty (and other social and structural drivers of morbidity) from a global health perspective. I hold an MSc in Poverty Reduction and Development Management from the International Development Department of the University of Birmingham as well as an MSc in Demography and Health from LSHTM. My PHD research at LSHTM examined the socioeconomic impact of highly active antiretroviral therapy on household livelihoods in Uganda.
Before joining LSHTM, I worked as a Research Officer at the Overseas Development Institute in London. I am affiliated with the Gender Violence and Health Centre which is part of the Social and Mathematical Epidemiology Group (SaME) in the Department of Global Health and Development (GHD).
I sit on the Strategic Leadership Team of The Centre for Maternal, Adolescent, Reproductive, & Child Health (MARCH) and co-lead the A=Adolescents theme. I am also an Associate Editor for Sexual and Reproductive Health Matters and BMC Women and sit on the high risk observational study ethics board of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
Affiliations
Centres
Teaching
I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. I enjoy teaching on a number of face-to-face and distance learning courses in the Faculties of Public Health and Policy and Infectious and Tropical Diseases. I am module organiser of Principles and Practice of Health Promotion and co-organiser of the GVHC short course Researching Gender Based Violence: Methods and Meaning. I supervise two LSHTM PhD students and a number of MSc students enrolled on both London-based and Distance Learning MSc programmes.
Research
My research focuses on the evaluation of interventions to prevent violence, and formative research to better understand the causes and contexts in which violence occurs. I led the qualitative evaluation of a number of trials and interventions including the Jigisémèjiri cash transfer programme in Mali, a randomised controlled trial of the Good School Toolkit in Uganda, and the qualitative evaluation of SASA! a community mobilisation intervention designed to prevent violence against women and reduce HIV risk-related behaviours.
My current research focuses on adolescent girls and young women and their vulnerability to violence. I am a member of STRIVE's multi-country (http://strive.lshtm.ac.uk/) Transactional Sex Working Group through which we work to improve the definition and measurement of transactional sex. This relates closely to my work with the inter-regional Learning Initiative on Norms Exploitation and Abuse (LINEA) (https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/linea) through which I explore the potential of social norms approaches to reduce adolescent vulnerability to transactional sex and sexual exploitation. Related to this is primary research that I lead concerning adolescent girls and modern slavery in fragile contexts and humanitarian settings with the intention of improving evidence to inform interventions to reduce adolescent girls' vulnerability. I am also developing a body of research on the vulnerability of female child domestic workers in South East Asia to exploitation and violence. This ambitious project will first seek to synthesise what is currently known about the exploitation and violence experienced by child domestic workers before convening a forum of experts to collaborate and design a programme of research intended to provide good quality evidence to inform intervention and policy action.
More broadly, my research interests centre on social and structural determinants of health. I am particularly motivated by action-oriented research to inform interventions and positive change.