Assessing socioeconomic vulnerability to malaria in Rwanda

From March 8 to June 6 2014, Jean Pierre Bizimana, PhD Student from the University of Rwanda spent three months for his third secondment at the Interfaculty Department of Geoinformatics – Z_GIS. The research stay was carried out in the context of the EC FP7 Research Project HEALTHY FUTURES.

.Jean Pierre’s PhD research focuses on the “Linkage between Climate Variability and Community Vulnerability to Malaria in Rwanda”. Based at the University of Rwanda, Jean Pierre is supervised by Dr Stefan Kienberger (Z_GIS). During his stay in Salzburg, Jean Pierre applied a composite indicator approach to assess socioeconomic vulnerability to malaria among the districts of Rwanda. By integrating multisource indicators of vulnerability to malaria Jean Pierre identified the most vulnerable districts in Rwanda in terms of *) susceptibility to not withstand malaria *) lack of resilience to anticipate, *) being able to cope with or to recover from malaria infection. The outcome of this research is the submitted manuscript for publication: “Bizimana, J.P; Kienberger, S. and Twarabamenye, E. (under review). Assessing socioeconomic vulnerability to malaria in Rwanda”, submitted to Malaria Journal.

Jean Pierre has also used the integrated geons approach as a spatial explicit approach for modeling homogeneous regions of vulnerability, which are independent from administrative boundaries. High levels of socioeconomic vulnerability to malaria are mainly found in highlands as well as in remote areas where local communities are more susceptible, lacking the capacity to anticipate mosquito biting exposure or are not resilient enough to cope with or recover from malaria infection. By decomposing vulnerability into its underlying factors, the proposed approach indicates which problem domains need to be addressed and shows where appropriate interventions are most needed. The outcome of this integrated modeling is the manuscript: “Bizimana, J.P; Kienberger, S.; Hagenlocher, M., and Twarabamenye, E (Under review). Modeling homogenous regions of socioeconomic vulnerability to malaria in Rwanda” submitted to the international journal of Applied Geography. The Z_GIS Team is looking forward to meeting Jean Pierre again at the international conference on “Climate Change and Vector Borne Diseases” to be held on 18-20th November, 2014, Kigali Rwanda.