BIOSKETCH
Prof Kawonga is a public health physician with 25 years of experience as a public health medicine specialist practitioner, researcher and academic. I have expertise in health systems analysis; using evidence to inform the design of health policy and programmes; supporting the technical aspects of health service planning, implementation, and evaluation at provincial, district, and institutional levels; and analysing and developing national and provincial policy. She is passionate about strengthening health system capacity at individual and institutional, levels. Academic leadership includes directing undergraduate and postgraduate teaching programmes, convening public health courses; leading curriculum review and design; supervising doctoral and master’s student research (supervised 27 master’s and five PhDs to completion and currently supervise nine master’s and three PhDs); and mentoring emerging researchers. Her research interests are in health services research and implementation science. In addition to 47 peer-reviewed articles, she has co-authored national policy, technical reports, national strategy documents and policy briefs. For 25 years She has dedicated a significant part of her research, advocacy, and policy work to cervical cancer prevention – including developing and testing strategies to put national policy into practice, co-drafting the national cervical cancer prevention policy, serving on technical teams tasked to develop implementation guidelines, serving on a WHO technical group developing a guide for essential practice, and using research evidence to develop contextually-relevant implementation guidelines for health programme managers and training guidelines for health practitioners.
TOPIC
Implementation science of cancer prevention and control strategies
