Across two rural sites in Kenya and The Gambia, researchers will co-design a community-centred programme to help people with high blood pressure get diagnosed and treated closer to home. Sub-Saharan Africa has some of the world’s highest rates of hypertension, and rural areas are hit hardest. Awareness, treatment, and control are all lower there than in cities, yet no study has shown that community health workers can effectively manage hypertension in these remote settings. This project fills that gap by working directly with patients, healthcare workers, and local leaders to understand why control fails and what can be done about it. If the programme proves feasible, it could reshape how hypertension care is delivered across rural Africa—shifting tasks from overstretched clinics to trained community health workers using simple diagnostic tools. That would mean fewer strokes, heart attacks, and kidney failures in places where access to a doctor is rare. The project also trains over 200 African researchers and builds a continent-wide hypertension network, creating lasting infrastructure for future studies.
View original technical description
Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has one of the highest prevalences of hypertension worldwide. The impact is particularly damaging in rural SSA where the prevalence of hypertension is as high as urban settings, but awareness, treatment and control is lower. The failure to control hypertension in rural SSA has multiple and complex causes across the hypertension control cascade, including limited access to healthcare services. Community-centred approaches using community health workers can play a key role in managing hypertension in areas remote from health facilities. However, no study has been conducted in rural SSA that demonstrates this. We will co-develop (with strong community and stakeholder engagement) a feasible and sustainable community-centred approach to target hypertension management more effectively and efficiently. Our activities will take place across two rural sites in: Kilifi, Kenya, and Kiang West, The Gambia; settings with a high burden of both hypertension and poverty. Our objectives are to: 1) Understand the experiences, needs, and practices at the individual, organisational and system levels to detect, treat and control hypertension; 2) Determine the optimal diagnostic and risk stratification approaches for people with hypertension; 3) Develop and evaluate the feasibility of a community-centred programme to improve the management of hypertension; The research will be divided into three linked work packages that match the specific objectives above. We will adopt a multidisciplinary research approach including document review; in-depth interviews, focus groups with patients living with hypertension, healthcare workers and other key stakeholders; cross-sectional studies to determine the accuracy of different blood pressure measurement methods and novel risk stratification approaches with point-of-care devices; a co-creation design to develop the intervention; and a study to evaluate its feasibility. The IHCoR-Africa Group is a partnership between KEMRI Wellcome Trust Kenya Research Programme, Medical Research Council The Gambia and The London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. We also have participation from government (Ministries of Health in Kenya and The Gambia), civil society (Non-Communicable Disease Alliance Kenya and Alcohol Policy Alliance in The Gambia), scientific organizations (Pan African Society of Cardiology, Kenya Society of Cardiology and African Academy of Science), and community representatives. Our established and strong engagement with key stakeholders and community will ensure grassroots dissemination and sustained implementation of findings beyond the research period. We will also pursue traditional dissemination routes including publishing results in academic journals and presenting at international conferences. The project will take place over 42 months and will also provide a focused, but ambitious, capacity strengthening programme including four post-doctoral positions, and strong technical skills and research strengthening programmes for over 200 African researchers. Finally, through collaboration with our multiple partners and other hypertension research groups from Uganda, Tanzania, Ghana, and Nigeria we will further develop an African multidisciplinary hypertension network which will serve as platform for future research.
Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.
Is something wrong? Let us know