Health Disparities in Fragile, Humanitarian and Climate-Vulnerable Settings

Research - Portfolios - Fragile Settings Diagram
When conflict, displacement and climate stress converge, mothers and children are the most vulnerable — and the data to protect them are weakest where they are needed most. We build the evidence to count everyone, and work — from complex health systems to refugee clinics — to find solutions that can reach them.

Summary

A growing share of the world's maternal and child deaths now occurs where conflict, displacement and climate stress converge. We follow the health of women and children along the full pathway of crisis: in conflict-affected and fragile settings, through displacement and transition, and into countries of resettlement, across environments where the climate is changing and disasters are unfolding.Our work starts from measurement, asking the questions that conventional approaches answer too slowly, or not at all: how far a woman in labour is from receiving care and how that shapes her chances of survival, and what her education, migrant status, ethnicity and economic status add to that distance; what exposure to war does to the babies of women who survive it, even after they have reached safety; and how a changing climate is reshaping the risks mothers and children face in strained, low-resource health systems.In each setting we examine, our focus is two-fold: disparities — who is hit hardest, who is reached last and who is left behind — and resilience — why some health systems, facilities and communities keep going under pressures that overwhelm others, what sustains them, and how that knowledge can be shared.

The portfolio is co-led by Dr Marwa Ramadan who works with Dr Siti Noraida Habibullah (School of Medicine), and is grounded in practice as well as scholarship. Dr Ramadan is a physician-epidemiologist with research collaborations and engagement spanning multilateral organisations and humanitarian agencies across more than 40 countries. Her work uses big data analytics to triangulate sources that rarely speak to each other, answering questions none of them can answer alone. Dr Siti Noraida is a Senior Lecturer at the Jeffrey Cheah School of Medicine and Health Sciences and a medical doctor with more than 25 years in clinical practice and healthcare leadership. Through Little Steps, the charity she founded, she runs Klinik Amal Muhajir — a charity medical and dental clinic serving refugees and asylum seekers in Klang — and a Cambodia Friendship Clinic for the poor, with a maternity home for vulnerable women under development in Kuala Lumpur; her humanitarian work has been recognised internationally, including with the Julia Taft Refugee Grant Award.