The Department of African American Studies would like to congratulate Chair and Professor Sangeetha Madhavan. Dr. Madhavan has been awarded a supplement award of 100K by the National Institutes of Health to support additional research activities for her ongoing NICHD funded JAMO project in Nairobi, Kenya.

Despite significant progress in improving child survival, sub-Saharan Africa continues to have some of the worst outcomes for children’s physical growth and early childhood development. This is driven in large part by elevated risks for children living in low-income urban communities. Whereas research has focused on environmental factors, socioeconomic status and access to services, much less effort has gone into understanding how rapid social transformation in marriage, and the role of kin, impacts children’s well-being in these communities. 

This project builds on the success of an NICHD R21 project to develop and test the Kinship Support Tree (KST) to assess quantity and quality of support from kin to single mothers and their children in a slum context in Nairobi, Kenya. This study will determine the extent to which kinship support and marriage benefit children in urban sub-Saharan African settings at a time when both are undergoing rapid transformation. By explicitly linking kinship support to marriage, we will be able to identify the relative contributions of mothers, fathers and extended kin to children’s well-being and apply the findings to develop more effective interventions.

They will also assess the extent to which union formalization moderates the effect of kinship support on physical growth and ECD outcomes and kinship support mediates the effect of union formalization on physical growth and early child development outcomes, using moderated mediation models. The ultimate goal of the study is to identify models of family support that offer optimum protection for vulnerable mothers and young children. The transformative contribution of this study is using the lens of caregiving for infants and children and support for mothers to better understand the relationship between kinship support and unions in urbanizing African contexts.