Mutsawashe Mutendi, a South African, is doing a PhD in Medical Anthropology at the University of Cape Town. She is conducting ethnographic research on women’s health in Zimbabwe’s artisanal mining sector.

Mutsawashe observed firsthand the collapse of Zimbabwe’s health infrastructure and resolved to close the gap between the social and medical fields. She realized that the full extent of women’s health issues in the extractive industries had not been professionally researched or understood by key stakeholders, including the women themselves. That knowledge gap resulted in both delayed recognition of their needs for, and limited access to, culturally responsive health services. Her research is expected to directly benefit about 600 women and their children, including those yet unborn, and she aims to reach many more through planned advocacy and policy development work.

When Shehani Perera was a young girl, her parents immigrated from Sri Lanka to Malawi, a country she fully adopted as her home.

She is now pursuing a PhD in Public Health and Human Rights at the University of Cape Town. As a social worker and public health researcher she assisted women and children in fulfilling basic human rights such as to health, dignity, and education. That led her to explore, in her PhD, human rights and HIV testing and counselling services among female patients. This work casts light on a way to abide by medical confidentiality principles while protecting public health interests, specifically assisted partner notification. That is a type of partner notification where a trained provider assists patients in notifying their sex or drug-injecting partners of their positive HIV diagnosis. With their consent, the providers assist the partners with getting tested for HIV and subsequent care. Shehani also works part-time as a Research Fellow on migration, gender, and health systems.

Her career goals are twofold: to continue to be in day-to-day contact with her target population as a social worker, and to have a broad impact through academics and policymaking at the local and international levels. She is particularly keen to help migrant women, informed by her personal experience as an immigrant who saw firsthand the kinds of injustices and social marginalization that often befall women and children.