On March 30, four USC Senior Fellows in Global Health Communication Leadership from across the African continent visited the campus to speak about their progress on global health communication.
The presentation was held in hybrid format both at ASC 207 and online starting at 3 p.m. The USC Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership and Policy partnered with the USC Institute on Inequalities in Global Health to host the event as part of their Africa – U.S. Initiative, which seeks to “incubate strategies for development through convening some of the brightest minds from across the globe,” according to its website.
The 2025-2026 fellows are Dr. Yewande Alimi, Dr. Jepchirchir Kiplagat, Mia Malan and Hon. Dr. Ben Malunga Phiri., all of whom are working on separate projects that they hope will bridge the gap between complex health topics and the world’s understanding of them.
“The background to it is that when it comes to global health issues, so much money has been invested, but little impact has been made,” said Phiri who is a cabinet minister for local government and rural development in the Republic of Malawi.
He pointed towards the creation of vaccines during the Covid-19 pandemic and how uptake was low in certain communities, resulting in many deaths. According to a 2025 study, only 22% of Malawians took the vaccine by December 2023, a statistic that was attributed to the spread of misinformation and mistrust in the health system. In America, about 66% of the population was considered fully vaccinated at that time.
“I’m trying to come up with the tools to address those communication gaps,” said Phiri, whose research is focused on making health information digestible to various Malawian communities in Africa. “Believability matters most when it comes to communication.”
Kiplagat has a similar goal for educating people about living with HIV.
Kiplagat is the director of research for an impact program between the Moi University Teaching and Referral Hospital in Kenya and the consortium of North American institutions led by Indiana University. Her research as a fellow focuses on understanding the challenges those with HIV face as they age; approximately 1.4 million people in Kenya have HIV and 5% of that population is of age 50 or older. Her project’s approach is to interview several affected individuals and give them a space to be vulnerable and honest in their own words.
“We rarely see the narrative of a person who’s really grown through this pandemic,” Kiplagat said. “This [is] because in most circumstances, it’s us researchers who are voicing their issues.”
The team then sits down with healthcare providers, policymakers, community leaders and other representatives to dissect these challenges and figure out the best way to structure communication about HIV.
Kiplagat’s research also takes on a multimedia approach by sharing information via radio and social media. This is also the approach of Malan, yet another senior fellow and health journalist who said her goal is to match climate health reporting to the ways people consume media today.
“The health consequences of climate change (are) underreported,” said Malan. “The objective of my project is to make that more prominent.”
According to a 2024 article published in the Daily Maverick, 84% of surveyed Africans use social media as their primary source of news, which has raised concerns over the spread of misinformation. Malan said she believes that the pervasion of false facts can also be used as a tool to study for change because it gives journalists an idea of what issues they need to report on.
Malan also discussed the incorporation of AI into her research while seeking to maintain journalistic integrity.
‘We have now started to use AI to produce social media [content] by feeding the entire script of the story into AI,” she said. “Certainly you still have to check it and you still have to make some corrections, but it definitely saves you three quarters of the time.”
She added she felt that it is important to understand your audience and use easy language when making content, adding that just having an accurate message is not enough.
Alimi similarly said she thinks that climate health communications also need to go beyond just sharing information.
“Stategic communication requires being able to create context specific, culturally sensitive, but most importantly, messages that have some citizen action,” said Alimi, who is also the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention One Health Programme unit lead.
Alimi said she specifically wants to make climate health information available to vulnerable groups as well as encourage people to take action as climate change creeps closer to being irreversible.
“Africa has the highest burden of the impact of climate change on health,” she said. “How do we ensure that we are also able to include equity into the conversations around climate and health…and (ensure) that strategic communications not just changes how we do things but can also improve their lives?”
While all four fellows plan to continue working and expanding upon their research, they expressed gratitude for the USC fellowship and ability to collaborate. Malan said she hopes their research findings may also eventually be applied to health communication outside of Africa.
“Over the past two decades, there’s often been a view that Africa needs to learn from Western countries,” Malan said. “And I think we’re at a stage where we can switch that and say what can Western countries like the U.S. learn from Africa?”