Social Policy and Child Health

Dr. Tia Palermo, Associate Professor, Department of Epidemiology and Environmental Health

Governments around the world create social policies that aim to improve their communities’ health, economic well-being, schooling and more. Policies not directly aimed at improving health may still have unintended effects (positive or negative) on the health of a population.

Dr. Tia Palermo, Associate Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Environmental Health, examines the impact these policies have on population health. A former researcher at the UNICEF Office of Research – Innocenti in Florence, Italy, Dr. Palermo led research on linkages between social policy and child and adolescent well-being in sub-Saharan Africa and was actively engaged in facilitating evidence uptake in government decision-making.

Currently, as co-Principal Investigator for studies in Tanzania and Ethiopia, Dr. Palermo studies how government social protection programs that aim to combat poverty and are linked with other services and complementary interventions, affect the health and well-being of children, adolescents, and their families. In a complementary project that aimed to understand one pathway of impact (stress reduction) that links social protection programs to improved health, Dr. Palermo and colleagues conducted a qualitative study that examined key stressors faced by adolescents and youth in rural sub-Saharan African settings. Then, they created a new measure of self-perceived stress - the Enhanced Life Distress Inventory (ELDI) - and tested the performance and psychometric properties of this measure in population-based surveys. Currently, Dr. Palermo and colleagues are studying whether cash transfers, one form of social protection programming, reduce stress as measured by the ELDI using quantitative data from four large-scale surveys in three countries.

Dr. Palermo is a member of the following Research Consortia: The Transfer Project, SPARKS Network for Health and Social Protection, and The Cash Transfer and Intimate Partner Violence Research Collaborative.

Articles and Reflections

SPARKS Conference Facilitates Exchange of Knowledge on Social Protection and Health
2/17/21
Fatima, a Master’s student in Liverpool, England, was diagnosed at the young age of 20 with Multidrug-resistant Tuberculosis. Fatima is a TB survivor, she endured 594 days of treatment and debilitating side-effects, all whilst fulfilling her requirements and obligations for her undergraduate degree.
A Cash Plus Pilot in Tanzania to Facilitate Safe Transitions to Adulthoodusaj
12/1/20
Dr. Lusajo Kajula spent nearly 16 years working as a lecturer at the Muhimbili University of Health and Allied Sciences (MUHAS) and a psychologist at Muhimbili National Hospital (MNH), the national referral hospital as well as the teaching facility for MUHAS, in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. In her role at MUHAS, Dr. Kajula was involved in multiple international research collaborations that addressed adolescent and youth sexual health and behavior in sub-Saharan Africa. At MUHAS, she was also part of the team that established Tanzania’s first master’s program in clinical psychology.

Recent Publications

Hidrobo, M., Kumar, N., Palermo, T., Peterman, A., & Roy, S. Gender-sensitive social protection.
Palermo TM, Valli E, Ángeles-Tagliaferro G LEAP 1000 Evaluation Team, et al. Impact evaluation of a social protection programme paired with fee waivers on enrolment in Ghana’s National Health Insurance Scheme. BMJ Open 2019;9:e028726. doi: 10.1136/bmjopen-2018-028726
Waidler, J., & Doctor, L. K. (2019, November). A cash plus model for safe transitions to adulthood: Impacts on the sexual and reproductive health knowledge of Tanzania’s youth. In APHA's 2019 Annual Meeting and Expo (Nov. 2-Nov. 6). American Public Health Association.
Sudhanshu Handa, Silvio Daidone, Amber Peterman, Benjamin Davis, Audrey Pereira, Tia Palermo, Jennifer Yablonski, Myth-Busting? Confronting Six Common Perceptions about Unconditional Cash Transfers as a Poverty Reduction Strategy in Africa, The World Bank Research Observer, Volume 33, Issue 2, August 2018, Pages 259–298, https://doi.org/10.1093/wbro/lky003

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Social Policy and Child Health

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