The Sunday Mail
Prof Francisca Mutapi is a professor in Global Health, Infection and Immunity at the University of Edinburgh.
She was recently celebrated as the first black female professor at the University of Edinburgh and in Scotland.
She has spent the past 20 years researching ways to control bilharzia, a common parasitic disease affecting millions of people in Africa, including Zimbabwe, particularly in rural areas.
Her interest was driven by seeing women and children spending a lot of time in rivers, which, however, led kids, including boys, producing blood in urine.
She wanted to understand this disease, find ways to stop it from being transmitted and stop the damage it was causing among young children and adults in Zimbabwe.
Her work has contributed to Zimbabwe’s national control programme for parasitic worms. Under the campaign, all schoolchildren have been receiving free treatment for parasitic worms since 2012.
Her work has also contributed to making 50 million children aged five years and below in Africa eligible for treatment of bilharzia.
These children could not be treated for bilharzia before this work.
She highlights examples of her Zimbabwean female colleagues whose work has contributed to scientific solutions to some problems in the country.
She describes how herding cattle instilled an interest in livestock breeding in one agriculture specialist, who was interested in establishing why some
cattle fared better in their village than others.
Another one became a pharmacist because she wanted to characterise active ingredients in some herbal medicines her grandmother used to treat colds and flu.
Further, a female colleague of hers became a psychologist so she could investigate the relationship between the body and the mind to understand how some traditional healing methods worked.
These examples indicate how local observations and challenges can grow the next generation of scientists.
