Welcome to the Child Health and Development Centre (CHDC).

Welcome to the Child Health and Development Centre (CHDC) website. CHDC is a multidisciplinary research, training and teaching Centre within the School of Medicine, Makerere University College of Health Sciences. CHDC was established in 1989 as a result of the growing recognition at the time of the need to mobilize available expertise within the university in community based activities geared to promoting sustainable child survival and development. This necessitated strong interdisciplinary approaches, training at community level, facilitating community empowerment, improved relations between communities and government support services as well as action oriented operational research, monitoring and evaluation mechanisms. Through research, training and community engagement CHDC created opportunities for effective interaction and partnerships between the university (staff and students), communities (involving the people that the capacity building program was to benefit) and the government (district officials and policy makers). The primary focus was on primary health care, primary and non-formal education, nutrition, water and sanitation and women and children’s well-being and development more generally.

Over the years in response to changing needs and priorities CHDC has evolved into a fully fledged research, training and teaching Centre with full time academic and administrative staff. Its mission is to promote children’s health, development and well-being through; interdisciplinary research, capacity development, creating of opportunities for effective interaction and partnerships between the university, communities and government and through more holistic conceptualizations of children’s health and development that encompass the health and wellbeing of their mothers, families and communities. CHDC acknowledges that children’s development is multidimensional in character involving different domains (physical-motor, cognitive, emotional and social) all of which influence each other thus demanding multidisciplinary research approaches. CHDC’s work is premised on the conviction that children, women and communities’ health needs go beyond biomedicine, to encompass complexities in families, communities, institutions of care and public policies. This explains the diversity of CHDC’s research projects, courses offered and the different research approaches used. 

Dr. Herbert Muyinda (PhD)
Director CHDC