We choose ... to help young mothers focus on their health
In global health, the most impactful solutions usually start with listening. Duke students Sydney Chen, Melat Woldetensae and Isabel Siebrecht carried that lesson with them when they first traveled to Kisumu, Kenya, in summer 2023, where they were part of a field research project aimed at improving screening for cervical cancer. They listened as young mothers described how they often missed medical appointments because there was no one to take care of their children. They listened, and then they acted.
Chen and Woldetensae spent the next year making plans to launch a childcare center in one of Kisumu’s county hospitals. Staffed by community health promoters, the Jali Watoto Childcare Centre opened in May 2024, giving mothers a free place to drop their children while they attend appointments.
But the students didn’t stop there. Chen and Woldetensae, along with fellow Duke student Anne Charles, continued to raise funds and coordinate with local partners to expand the childcare program. In 2025, they won a grant from Davis Projects for Peace to return to Kenya to oversee the launch of a center at a second hospital near Kisumu. And although all three students graduated in spring 2025, they say they are committed to ensuring a sustainable long-term future for the program under local leadership.
“The students worked on this very independently to try to address a challenge they were seeing for women visiting the clinics,” says Megan Huchko, M.D., an associate professor who leads DGHI’s ongoing collaborations on cervical cancer prevention in Kenya. “They truly worked in partnership to design something that the county values and has ownership over. It’s a great model of co-creation and mutual respect.”
“Projects like ours have given back to us as much as we’ve given,” says Chen. And while small collaborations such as the childcare centers can’t offset the wider impact of cuts in foreign assistance, she says they show “there are still people who care and are capable of working with international communities.”
For more about the impact Jali Watoto is having in Kisumu, read our summer 2024 story about the center’s formal opening. Chen also wrote a blog about her summer 2025 return trip to Kenya and how working on the childcare project has given her hope despite the wider challenges to global health funding.