Dr Adamu Addissie, Associate Professor at the School of Public Health at Addis Ababa University and a longstanding friend of Global Health at BSMS, visited the Rwanda GHRU team in November 2022 to facilitate a workshop on ‘Rapid Ethical Assessment’ (REA): Considerations & Application for Informed Consent for Podo-Research’.
What is a Rapid Ethical Assessment?
Adamu is an internationally renowned expert on REA, an ethnographic approach developed to design context-tailored consent processes for voluntary participation in research.
With Adamu’s guidance, REA has been conducted before for a number of our global health research projects to help address some of the specific challenges faced when working with communities in low-income settings and where study participants’ socioeconomic status, education level and poor health make them vulnerable. It these settings it can be challenging to deliver complex information in a comprehensible way.
These issues are explored using REA to ensure consent is truly informed and participation truly voluntary. The REA process is itself tailored specifically to each community and research project, thus Adamu found himself in Kigali to support REA activities prior to the start of GHRU research in Rwanda.
How is REA involved in the GHRU?
Co-organised by Dr Lawrence Rugema and Jean Pierre Ngangali, the REA workshop began with an introduction from Lawrence to the Rwandan team and an overview of the podoconiosis projects planned in Rwanda. He encouraged the workshop participants to learn from the Ethiopian experience as they developed REA protocols for the Rwandan context.
Adamu then gave an overview of REA highlighting what it was and what it was not, explaining the role of REA in mapping the ethical terrain prior to recruiting study participants. Reference was made to the need to contextualize REA in Rwanda.
The workshop concluded with an agreement to design and implement REA protocols for use in Rwanda as a collaboration between the Universities of Addis Ababa and Rwanda.
NTDs Research 