At Integrate Health, strong partnerships are at the heart of how we work.
In 2004, IH was founded through a collaboration among Togolese activists, individuals living with HIV, and American Peace Corps Volunteers. This collaboration continues today with Brianna Birchett, a Peace Corps Response Volunteer serving in Kara, and our Senior Research Manager Désiré Dabla. They work closely together, leveraging local expertise alongside an external perspective to strengthen the data and research systems that underpin our programs in Togo and Guinea. In honor of Peace Corps Week, we sat down with Brianna and Désiré to hear more about their partnership.
Brianna, what drew you to apply for a Peace Corps Response Volunteer position with Integrate Health, and how does this role differ from traditional Peace Corps service?
I have previously lived and worked in India and England, and I love the challenge of adapting to a totally new environment. I had been working in Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) in Washington, D.C., and I wanted to pivot to global health. When I saw the opportunity to work with Integrate Health, it was exactly what I wanted.
As for how it differs from traditional service: typical Peace Corps service is a 27-month commitment focused on community integration and volunteer-led projects. Peace Corps Response is different in that it is a specialist-to-specialist knowledge exchange. Integrate Health already had rigorous M&E systems in place, so I’m there to offer an external technical perspective and contribute wherever I can.
Integrate Health is committed to uplifting local approaches rather than imposing outside solutions. Désiré, how do you see this philosophy reflected in your daily work and work with Brianna?
Brianna is not here with an imported solution—she’s here as a resource to help us with our projects. Instead of designing a complex new system from the outside, we work together on how we approach our different programs. I provide a grounded understanding of the community, the systems, and the culture, and she contributes expertise in data collection methods, frameworks, and techniques we can use to explore specific problems. She brings a toolkit and a fresh external perspective, and together we strengthen our work by combining that with our local knowledge.
Brianna, what have you learned from your Togolese colleagues that has changed or expanded your perspective on public health or development work?
I came from a headquarters environment where it was easy to see numbers on a screen as just numbers. Being in Togo, I meet and work with the people behind the data points—they are health centers supervisors, Community Health Workers, M&E staff in Kara and Lomé. My colleagues take data collection personally and are deeply connected to our mission. This commitment underlies how an organization can maintain technical rigor even when the infrastructure is challenging. Internet connectivity and transportation can be difficult, but my colleagues show up every day and make sure the work gets done. This dedication has expanded my understanding of what contributes to an organization’s sustainability.
Brianna, after spending three months integrating into Kara, what have you appreciated about Togolese culture?
Each Friday after work, I’ve been visiting a bean stand about a mile from the office. I treat myself to a bowl of beans with a spicy sauce and a crunchy topping—all over spaghetti. There’s a little bench in the shade along the street, and I just sit there, have a delicious meal, and watch people pass by. It’s become my favorite weekly ritual. People exude warmth here. Even in a bigger city like Kara, strangers say hello and ask about your health and your family.
Brianna recently conducted a literature review on adolescent pregnancy and contraception. Désiré, how does this support the work being done in Kara? Are there any challenges or gaps you found that IH is now trying to fill?
In the Kara region, our work is focused on maternal and child health, and we have strong numbers for indicators like pre- and post-natal health center consultations. However, the indicator for utilization of modern family planning methods is not performing as well.
When we looked specifically at adolescent girls, we found they were not benefiting from the maternal health program as the rate of family planning utilization was not improving. This data tells us that our current approach has not been able to adequately address family planning for adolescents specifically.
When Brianna conducted the literature review on adolescent pregnancy and contraception, it aligned with something we were already seeing in our data. Now we can use the review to examine interventions that have been tried elsewhere to give us ideas about where we could start with the community to develop targeted interventions for that population.
Brianna, looking back on your first few months in Kara, which task has been the most challenging, and what made it rewarding?
We have been working on an evaluation in Guinea of the Kendeya mobile app, which Community Health Workers use to collect patient data during consultations.
The evaluation is intended to measure impact and identify areas for improvement. Team coordination has been challenging as the app involves the technical, monitoring and evaluation, research, and finance teams, while also ensuring our partners from the government of Guinea have their questions addressed.
That said, it’s been the most rewarding part of my work so far. If the evaluation shows that the app is performing significantly better than the paper-based system it replaced, there is potential for it to be scaled up by the government of Guinea to the national level. It’s rewarding to think that I may have played a small part in something so impactful.
As we celebrate Peace Corps Week, what does service mean to both of you, and how has this experience shaped your understanding of partnership and collaboration in global health?
Brianna: In my case as a Peace Corps Response Volunteer, service means technical solidarity. It’s about showing up with a specific skill set and serving a local mission. I’m not here to rearrange what’s already working. I’m here to see what gaps I can help fill and what processes could use extra support. Sometimes just having an extra pair of hands is the difference between something getting done or not.
Partnership is the daily work of mutual learning and knowledge exchange, chipping away at an abstract goal in smaller, concrete steps with the same colleagues each day. Global health goals can be achieved this way by pairing local expertise with specialized external skills.
Désiré: For me, service means bringing your unique skills to the table without thinking you know everything. In terms of global partnership, the way we work at Integrate Health reflects this well: we design interventions with communities, not for them. We listen to communities first, and then we bring together our skills with their contextual knowledge. We co-create interventions focused on community impact. That is the heart of service: design with, not for.
