On International Women’s Day 2022, we celebrate all of the inspirational women at The Union, as we stand against inequality.
The Union is a diverse organisation, with female staff, consultants and members across the world in a variety of roles and fields. Today we shine the spotlight on just a few of these incredible women.
Dr Karuna D Sagili
Deputy Director – Knowledge Management and Research, The Union South East Asia
I am Dr Karuna D Sagili, holding a PhD in Genetics and with over 17 years of work experience. I support the Advocacy, Communication and Social Mobilisation (ACSM) National Technical Support Unit (NTSU) as the Deputy Director – Knowledge Management and Research at The Union’s South East Asia office, New Delhi. In the current role, I provide technical support to the ACSM NTSU in knowledge management, monitoring and evaluation and research, focussing on accelerating a ‘Jan Andolan’, which means a ‘People’s movement’ to eliminate tuberculosis (TB) in India. Issues like TB-related stigma, behaviour change, and social aspects of TB are my areas of research interest apart from the programmatic aspects.
Before joining The Union, my work focussed on basic research in Leprosy, HIV/AIDS and advocacy on Child Rights. I was captured by the suffering and the challenges the people living with HIV were facing. After brief training in counselling, I counselled over 500 individuals with HIV/AIDS over a period of three and half years. I was also engaged in advocacy at a national level, where I organised several conferences and collaborated with key stakeholders for the education of girls and addressing child sexual abuse.
I joined The Union South East Asia office in 2012, as a Research Associate facilitating operational research (OR) under Project Axshya, a Global Fund supported project. I went through the OR training conducted by The Union, which is renowned for its expertise in the field. From then on, I have been a faculty, a mentor and the course coordinator for a number of OR courses that The Union conducted and in collaboration with WHO/TDR on TB and antimicrobial resistance. I led several OR projects, especially those supported under The Global Fund grant of the TB Department for last several years. During the course of my work, we organised training on how to conduct systematic reviews in collaboration with Cochrane Collaboration South Asia, and pursued a partnership with the Cochrane Collaboration Liverpool’s Infectious Disease Group called ‘Research Evidence and Development Initiative (READ It)’. I have co-authored over 50 publications to date.
As I started learning OR and public health research, I saw the potential OR has to contribute to policy change and the impact of this change was very high. We can change people’s lives through OR, by policy advocacy, alleviate suffering and bring quality in public health services, at a largescale – at district, state or national level. This has been a continuous motivation for me to pursue public health research.
However, we do see that most of the public health researchers are medical professionals. It’s a challenge for non-medicals to enter into this field or sustain their entry. Also, there are very few women public health researchers. I would like to encourage young researchers, to pursue the opportunities of public health research as an opportunity to utilising one’s skills for the betterment of public health. There were young researchers who contacted me asking for advice, the main challenge they face is that researchers with non-medical backgrounds, especially those from Life Sciences do not get entry into this field. There is a need for larger advocacy on this issue. Research skills are always transferable and hence they should be given opportunities.
I believe that operational research is key in optimising public health, its scope reaching across various diseases, be it TB, HIV/AIDS, antimicrobial resistance, non-communicable diseases, cancers or COVID-19. I believe it has the power to change. We need more researchers, including women, passionate for public health, to change lives, we need donors who support this research and organisations to create avenues to utilise operational research for better lives. Researchers are change agents!