16/03/23

Now is the time to promote women – award winner

Blas2_optimised
Researcher Magaly Blas (left) dedicates her work to caring for maternal and neonatal health in rural and remote areas of the Peruvian Amazon. She wants her research to have a positive impact on communities and serve as the basis for public policies on health in Peru. Copyright: Magaly Blas/Mamás del Río

Speed read

  • Peruvian Mothers of the River project uses tablets to share health information
  • Founder Magaly Blas says measuring impact of interventions is essential
  • More women scientists needed to bring ‘innovative perspective’ she says

Send to a friend

The details you provide on this page will not be used to send unsolicited email, and will not be sold to a 3rd party. See privacy policy.

This article was supported by the Elsevier Foundation.

Magaly Blas decided that she would fight against the injustices and inequities of Peru’s rural indigenous communities from a very early age.

“When I was a child, my mum used to take me to the Peruvian Sierra where she supervised social projects and, along the way, I saw a world that we don’t see in the capital, where there are people who don’t have access to basic services,” says Blas, a physician and researcher at Cayetano Heredia University, Lima.

Years later, she led an investigation which evaluated the association of two viruses – human T-lymphotropic virus and human papilloma virus – in the Peruvian Amazon, and although the work had conclusive results for the academic community, she felt something was missing.

“If I had been a man, I don’t know if I would have created Mothers of the River, I wouldn’t have been able to experience pregnancy, I wouldn’t have been able to have that perspective of such immense inequity in health.”

Magaly Blas, Cayetano Heredia University, Lima

 

“I didn’t feel that I directly helped the communities. When I came back later, I saw women living in the same conditions,” she told SciDev.Net.

“That’s one of the reasons why I promised myself that what I do should really have a direct impact on the communities and ideally become public policy.”

In 2014, Blas, who is also an associate professor in the department of global health at the University of Washington, founded Mothers of the River, a project that works in 84 rural communities in the Loreto region, along the Amazon river, in northeast Peru.

Its mission is to improve maternal and neonatal health in rural areas of the Peruvian Amazon through Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), with the training of special community “agents” and the use of tablets for disseminating and monitoring content on health issues.

With technology and the work of community agents, Magaly Blas’s project Mothers of the River raises awareness about health care for women and children in rural communities.

Mothers and sisters

“When women see this material they say: ‘It’s like my mum is talking to me, like my sister is telling me this story’,” says Blas. “That’s the great potential of technology, because they don’t need to be able to read to understand the warning signs of pregnancy; they need to see a story told by one of their sisters.”

Blas explains that in her role as an epidemiologist – a specialist in diseases – her focus is to measure the impact of what she has done.

“In Peru, there was no evaluation of the impact of visits by community agents on neonatal health,” she says. “Our research is the first to shed light on the positive impact of community outreach visits on the essential care of newborns and on improving their health.

“Measuring that is extremely important because it gives you an idea of the impact you can have and serves as a basis for health decision makers to use this tool.”

Blas has been awarded the 2016 Elsevier Foundation/OWSD Award for early career women scientists, the 2016 L’Oréal-UNESCO-CONCYTEC-ANC Award for Peruvian women scientists, and the 2016 Good Practices in Public Administration Award for the Mothers of the River project.

In 2019, she received the Social Innovation in Health Initiative award from the Pan American Health Organization.

“I believe that women need to get more involved in science because science is the basis for transformation of society.”

Magaly Blas, epidemiologist, Cayetano Heredia University, Lima

She believes that, in light of awards for women scientists such as those run by L’Oréal and Elsevier Foundation, now is the time to encourage more women in science.

“If I had been a man, I don’t know if I would have created Mothers of the River, I wouldn’t have been able to experience pregnancy, I wouldn’t have been able to have that perspective of such immense inequity in health, which needs to be solved,” she says.

“I believe that women need to get more involved in science because science is the basis for transformation of society.

“I think we bring a very interesting and innovative perspective – we see the approach to certain problems in a different way – and it is essential that we are included in scientific work.”

This article was supported by the Elsevier Foundation, a corporate foundation focused on sustainable development in gender, health, climate and reducing inequalities. The Elsevier Foundation is funded by Elsevier, a global leader in information and analytics helping researchers and healthcare professionals to advance science and improve health outcomes.

This Q&A is part of a series of three interviews with influential female scientists and changemakers from Latin America as result of a partnership between the Elsevier Foundation and SciDev.Net.

The three scientists will be part of a panel at the World Conference of Science Journalists in Medellin, Colombia (27-31 March), discussing gender in research.

This piece was produced by SciDev.Net’s Latin America and Caribbean desk and edited for clarity and brevity.