Scholastica Zakayo

Scholar is a Wellcome Trust-funded DPhil student based at the Ethox Centre under the supervision of Professor Patricia Kingori and Professor Proochista Ariana of the Nuffield Department of Medicine.

Scholar’s DPhil is embedded within the Wellcome Trust-funded research project, ‘Fakes, Fabrications and Falsehoods? Interrogating the social, ethical and political features of pseudo-global health’ (209830/Z/17/Z), led by Patricia Kingori.

She will  investigate real-world practical and ethical challenges for frontline health workers regarding the quality of medicine in the context of maternal health, with the aim of understanding how frontline health workers identify fake products, what contextual factors influence their ability to discern what is genuine or degraded, their perceptions, challenges, and what informs their decisions/actions, especially in limited-resource settings.

Scholar holds an MSc in International Health & Tropical Medicine from the University of Oxford and a BA in Anthropology from Moi University in Kenya. She is keen on promoting the value of social sciences in contributing to global health and in particular, in improving access to and quality of maternal health care.

Akin to her interests, Scholar has previously worked and collaborated on interdisciplinary studies investigating socio-cultural and structural determinants of maternal and new-born health service provision and utilisation in resource-constrained countries such as Kenya and Papua New Guinea. She has also published in peer-reviewed scientific journals and aims to contribute to high-quality research outputs.

More recently, Scholar has been responsible for supporting and coordinating activities and communications on the Social Sciences hub of the Global Health Network website.