About The Project

This 4 week project is a new scheme developed by the Swansea-Gambia Link and Swansea University International Office and is part of the broader Wales for Africa Health Links Network. Ten post-graduate students from the Schools of Medicine, Human and Health Sciences and Arts and Humanities and Media Studies will travel to Gambia to carry out a research project looking at Health in the context of International development. The project aims to consider the inter-dependency between malnutrition and broader environmental and development issues. It will go towards helping the UN Millennium Development Goal paying particular attention to MDG 8 – A global Partnership for Development. The students will work together with students from Gambia University and Medical School to explore the immediate and broader factors that result in malnutrition. To do this they will utilise a case-study methodology, selecting one infant suffering from malnutrition and considering the social, cultural and environmental pathways that have led to the infant's illness.
Read the Blog in Welsh here
This is a student-led and student-maintained Blog. If you have any comments or questions, please contact Jimmy Hay at 341465@swansea.ac.uk

Tuesday 27 July 2010

Day 1

Yesterday was our first day at the Royal Victoria Teaching Hospital, and we finally met our Gambian colleagues who we will be co-running the project with. It was great to get underway with the project, and brilliant to exchange ideas and research with the Gambian students. It was also extremely productive as in just a few hours together we were able to organise a structure and methodology to work to for the next four weeks.

We arrived at the Royal Victoria Teaching Hospital at 9am, and after meeting several hospital dignitaries we had an introductory session with the Gambian students and tutors, where we all introduced ourselves, our areas of study and our individual aims for the project. It was particularly pleasing to see that the Gambian group were as diverse as ourselves, with students from medicine, nursing, politics and international relations, as its inter-disciplinary nature is exactly what makes this project so innovative.

We then had a tour of the hospital, before moving to one of the hospitals many teaching rooms to discuss the project in detail.

Arranging ourselves into three groups, with equal number of Gambian and Swansea students in each, we discussed the three core elements of the project: The case-study, the project methodology, and the various project outputs. Choosing the case study is going to be one of the most culturally sensitive parts of the whole project, and one that until today, discussing the matter with the Gambian students, we didn’t know how exactly to approach. Their knowledge of hospital protocol, however, and in particular their familiarity with the cultural sensitivities of Gambian families, was invaluable in this discussion.

Working collaboratively for the first time with the Gambian students has really set the tone for the whole project, as we were all able to combine our respective experiences of health and cultural practices in our own countries to form the overall direction and structure for out time together in Gambia.

It is this sense of cultural partnership that was paramount at the inception of the Swansea-Gambia Link, and it’s fantastic to finally be a part of it in a practical and tangible manner.



Read the Blog in Welsh here
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