The African Health Economics and Policy Association (AfHEA) is pleased to invite experts, analysts, practitioners and researchers in the relevant health fields to submit abstracts for the sixth Scientific Conference to be held in Kigali, Rwanda in March 2022. The exact dates will be announced in due course. 

Due to the challenges posed by the covid-19 pandemic, the conference will adopt a hybrid format where some delegates will be onsite in Kigali, and others will join virtually.

Theme and sub-themes

The broad theme of the conference is: Towards Resilient Health Systems in Africa: The Role of Health Economics and Policy Research.

The sub-themes of the conference are:

1. Decolonizing Health Economics and policy research and the drive for greater equity and inclusion.
2. Vaccine economics: equity, distribution, financing, trade and the lessons learnt during the covid-19 pandemic.
3. What adjustments are required to make health and health financing systems in Africa more resilient to pandemics?
4. Cost-effectiveness of addressing social/underlying determinants of poor health vs. funding medical interventions.
5. Building back better health systems: the role of innovation, multi-sectoral approaches and global financial architecture in building resilient health systems in Africa.
6. UHC, politics, policy processes, and reforms during covid-19 pandemic.
7. The role and use of data and evidence for policy decisions in a pandemic (the case of covid-19).
8. Looking to the future: what plans are in place to mitigate the impact of covid-19 post the pandemic?

Health Economics, Public Health and Health Policy researchers in particular are encouraged to submit abstracts on this broad theme and its sub-themes or indeed on any other interesting, innovative, or topical African health sector or systems research which upon selection by our scientific committee may be presented orally or in poster format at the conference.

Proposals for organised sessions

Proposals for organized sessions are also invited from interested individuals or institutions.

An organized session must have a session organizer, who will describe the overall session in the session abstract, and a maximum of five individual abstracts describing the individual presentations of the session, as per the organized session structure described further below.

Please note, however, that we do not accept proposals for plenary sessions.

Language and structure of abstracts

Abstracts may be submitted in English or French and must be structured as follows:

Structure of individual abstracts

• Title of paper
• Name, institutional affiliation, phone number and e-mail address of presenting author
• Names of co-authors
• 400-word maximum structured abstract in plain text or MS Word format (PDFs will be rejected), which indicates the background, aims and objectives of the research, the methods used, the key findings and the main conclusion(s). Abstracts submitted in MS Word must be in Times New Roman, font size 12.

Authors should submit individual abstracts online https://afhea.confex.com/afhea/2022/cfp.cgi no later than September 30, 2021.

 

Structure of proposals for organized sessions

• Title of organized session
• Principle organizer (Name, institutional affiliation, phone number and email address)
• Co-organizers (Names, institutional affiliations and email addresses)
• Session abstract: 400-word maximum structured abstract in MS Word format (PDFs will be rejected) that provides a summary of the session
• Abstract of each paper (max 400 words in plain text or MS Word format): should include the aims and objectives of the paper and the key findings (do not include annexes). The maximum number of papers allowed for each session is 5. Abstracts submitted in MS Word must be in Times New Roman, font size 12.  

The proposals for organized sessions should be submitted online https://afhea.confex.com/afhea/2022/cfp.cgi

The deadline for submission of proposals for organized sessions is October 31, 2021.

Note that there are different online submission forms for individual and organized session abstracts and the correct form must be used.

All abstracts submitted will be reviewed by the Scientific Committee.

Review process

To ensure a high scientific standard of the presentations at the conference, a quality assurance process which is consistent with the capacity building goal of AfHEA will be used in the review of abstracts.

Reviewed abstracts will be categorised as follows:

• Accept category: abstracts that meet all the set criteria and for which the reviewers have no doubt about their high standard
• Revise category: abstracts that can be markedly improved after addressing comments given by reviewers or for which the scientific committee judges that there is not enough basis from the abstract alone to make a firm determination of the likely suitability and quality of the final presentation.
• Reject category: abstracts that do not meet the set criteria and which reviewers find are of a low standard

 This categorization ensures that junior researchers, whose abstracts would otherwise be rejected, benefit from a mentorship process (described below) and hence an opportunity to present a quality paper in an international conference. The quality of the presentation of studies whose abstracts fall into the ‘Revise category’ will be improved through the following QA process:

• Mentorship support (virtual and face-to-face) will be offered to junior researchers to help improve their abstracts and presentations.
• Presenters will be required to submit their draft PPT presentations, before the conference, for review by the reviewers. Reviewed abstracts and presentations will be returned to presenters by January 15, 2022.
• Such authors may further be asked to make mock presentations on the first day of the conference (before the conference sessions begin).

This process is consistent with AfHEA’s goal of capacity building for junior colleagues.

Participation in the mentorship and revision processes is voluntary but AfHEA reserves the right to reject an abstract outright should the author(s) refuse to take advantage of the above quality assurance process.

The abstract submissions received for the conference (individual and organized sessions) will inform the organization of the parallel sessions and AfHEA reserves the right to determine the technical composition of those sessions. Applicants for individual abstracts will be notified of reviewers’ decision on their abstracts by November 30, 2021 while applicants of organized sessions will be notified no later than November 30, 2021.

Summary of key dates

 

Activity	Deadline
Submission of individual abstracts	September 30, 2021
Submission of proposals for organised sessions	October 31, 2021
Feedback on individual abstracts	November 30, 2021
Feedback on proposals for organised sessions	November 30, 2021
Review of mentees’ presentations	January 15, 2022