How NIAMR engages with communities and stakeholders

How NIAMR engages with communities and stakeholders

The National Integrated Digital AMR Platform (NIAMR) is not a tool we are building in isolation. It is being designed, developed, and evaluated in partnership with the people and institutions who will ultimately use and depend on it — the Ministry of Health and its related agencies, the national health laboratory network, frontline researchers, implementing partners, and the wider One Health community in Uganda.

Our engagement model follows the World Health Organisation's "co-design with the user" principles. In practice, this means that at every phase of the project — from the national situation analysis in Phase 1 through to the costing for One Health scaling in Phase 5 — the Makerere University research team engages and works with the community, including:

• The Ministry of Health (MoH), which leads policy, planning, and governance of all health data in the country, and which will approve the NIAMR platform for deployment and roll-out;
• Uganda's National Health Laboratories and Diagnostics Services (NHLDS), which provides stewardship for the AMR surveillance network and coordinates the introduction of the NIAMR intervention;
• The Baylor College of Medicine Children's Foundation-Uganda (BCMCF-Uganda), which coordinates UK Fleming Fund Phase II investments and supports multisectoral antimicrobial stewardship and AMR surveillance in line with Uganda's National Action Plan on AMR (2024–2029);
• Mbarara University of Science and Technology (MUST), representing the AMR academia and researcher / scientist community.

These Community Engagement and Involvement (CEI) partnerships are not symbolic. Dr. Charles Olaro, Director General of Health Services at MoH, leads the CEI representation, supported by Dr. Susan Nabadda, Commissioner at NHLDS, and Mr. Roger Kisame, Programme Manager at BCMCF-Uganda. Their role is to ensure that the NIAMR platform meets the real-world data protection, data sharing, and surveillance needs of Uganda's health system — and that the intervention is acceptable, feasible, and ethically sound.

Why co-design matters for AMR surveillance

AMR data in many low- and medium-income countries, including Uganda, remains fragmented, incomplete, and underutilised for decision-making. This is a well-documented gap — highlighted at the United Nations General Assembly High-Level Meeting on AMR, in the Africa CDC Landmark Report, and in Uganda's own National Action Plan on AMR (2024–2029).

Closing this gap is not a technical problem alone. It requires clarity on national AMR data needs, trust between institutions that generate data and those that use it, and governance structures that make data sharing safe and useful. Co-design is how we surface those needs, build that trust, and shape those governance structures.

What engagement looks like in practice

Across the project's three-year span, engagement activities will include:

• Situation analysis workshops with facility-level and national-level stakeholders to map current AMR data flows (Phase 1).
• Co-design sessions on the NIAMR platform's data capture, processing, and sharing features (Phase 2).
• Implementation workshops in pilot districts identified as AMR high-burden zones (Phase 2).
• Evaluation dialogues with users, managers, and policy-makers to assess the platform's performance and data use (Phases 3 and 4).
• Costing and scaling consultations to inform integration across One Health sectors — human, animal, water, and environment (Phase 5).

This page will be updated as these activities take place. We will share workshop reports, key findings, and the voices of the stakeholders shaping NIAMR.

This post was compiled by the NIAMR Project Team based on project documentation and the CEI framing developed by the Project Lead, Prof. Josephine Nabukenya.