Action Aid, an international non-governmental organization (NGO), has just hired you for its global health programs as the field program officer. Your previous manager from the World Health Organization recommended you for the job and now you are required to do a comprehensive Assessment for a USAID funded project in Kigali, in the Republic of Rwanda. Kigali has been hit with COVID-19 few months ago, but the cases have dwindled since last week. Unfortunately, in the last three days, there has been another outbreak of a new variant of COVID. Experts say it is highly infectious and the death rate has been increasing especially among the elderly and children. International organizations and foreign governments have been collaborating to help.

Food shortages, malnutrition, and lack of water supply are problematic in Kigali because of lack of irrigation. Action Aid is helping with the construction of water wells, but they have a long way to go especially in dealing with the culture and beliefs of the local citizens.

One of the issues you discovered was that the new variant affected only a specific demographic. The government in Kigali has changed health policies to favor nations that came in to help and many primary health organizations are teaching the population preventive measures and other infection control measures. To save lives certain risk behaviors were banned by the government and a mask mandate was instituted for everyone in the community.

Your work in Kigali is to do a thorough assessment for Action Aid and prepare a report to the [presented to USAID for funding. In your 4 to 6 page report, address the following areas in justifying your request for funding.

Describe the challenges and barriers of measuring health and disease among people of a non-western culture like those in Kigali.

Explain the benefits and limitations of the western biomedical approach to health in other cultural contexts.

How could you apply those measures to the situation in Kigali?

Describe some of the dominant types of cultural explanations of disease causation and methods for understanding culture

Explain the relationship between social determinants and the challenges of improving the health population in the community.

Describe why the children and elderly were more vulnerable to the disease outbreak in Kigali, and what role did malnutrition and micronutrient deficiencies play in this case.

Do you believe the situation would have been different if it were a western country? Why?

How did the difference in income level of the population become a factor in the spread and severity of the disease?

Discuss mitigation to the cumulative exposure to risk factors, as well as alleviation strategies that impact health outcomes.

Describe policy responses you would recommend to the government in Kigali to help mitigate the problem.