Alumna Wins World Bank Video Contest.

A series of fortunate events, combined with a budding interest in journalism, made Laura Hanson’s practicum the type of career-expanding experience most students hope to have.

Hanson, a 2013 graduate of SPH with an MPH in global health, worked in Namibia for her practicum, helped by a grant from the Santander Universities Scholars program. While there, she started a video project for her culminating experience that became the short film “Clinic on the Move,” which recently took top honors in a World Bank-sponsored contest for depictions of innovative public-private partnerships in health in developing countries.

The video came out of Hanson’s practicum experience at PharmAccess, a group of non-profit organizations dedicated to providing access to affordable, quality health care in Africa by stimulating investments through partnerships with private sector and government institutions.

Hanson was assigned to work with Pharmaccess’ mobile health care program called Mister Sister. The Mister Sister mobile clinics are brightly painted trucks that provide primary health care services to remote and underserved people in Namibia.

The semester before her practicum, Hanson took a narrative radio class that was her first exposure to journalism. She brought a recorder to Namibia just in case she came across people with interesting stories that could make for compelling audio.

“We were going out to these remote villages that were 100 kilometers from the nearest health center to help conduct baseline assessments of health care needs,” Hanson said.  “At night I would sit down with people and practice my radio interviewing skills.”

But as it happened, Mister Sister was looking for a video to help kick start a demand-creation campaign to help farmers understand that using the service could help them save money by reducing or eliminating the need to drive long distances when their workers got sick.

Hanson said she initially agreed to take on the project in a limited capacity. “At the time I was thinking that I didn’t have much experience making videos, and I would help them script and storyboard it.”

But once the team at Mister Sister started researching the scope of the work and coordinating with film crews, “We realized that it would be really costly, so I backtracked and said I would try to do it myself.” Hanson began the project with photos and audio collected during her initial practicum, then returned to Namibia in 2014 to collect additional interviews and footage. Recent SPH alumna Devon Cain (MPH ’15) helped submit the application for the World Bank contest.

Through contacts at the UN and other well-placed supporters, the Mister Sister team was able to set up an interview with the first lady of Namibia, who Hanson said turned out to be a big proponent of the service.

“We ended up with a video that had a lot of target audiences but was very focused on the program itself,” Hanson said. “It reinforced that Mister Sister is a very unique model for providing healthcare to an area that is very difficult to serve.

“It complements what the ministry of health is already trying to do, but it’s an example of how mixed funding models and private sector funding can help fill that gap in coverage in rural areas. Namibia is one of those countries that is trying to transition from being a low- to a middle-income country, which means less foreign aid and external funding.”

Programs like Mister Sister could work in other settings, Hanson said, but that fact is often not well communicated. Mobile clinic programs are traditionally difficult to maintain, but the public-private partner ship approach has huge potential in maintaining health workers on the ground.

“To have ownership of a project like that was a really transformative experience,” Hanson said. “It gave me something to stand on in terms of building a career in public health communications.”