Social Work on a Global Scale: Sexual and Mental Health Inequities Among Forcibly Displaced and Migrant Youth with Dr. Moses Okumu
The School of Social Work’s International Committee brings together a group of faculty whose work stretches across continents and communities, united by a commitment to expanding the reach and relevance of social work worldwide. Through their research, faculty members actively shape the future of international practice and drive meaningful global impact.
In this interview series, they share how they continue to advance their work amid tightening funding landscapes, along with their candid perspectives on why global social work remains essential to building a more just and connected world.
School of Social Work Assistant Professor Dr. Moses Okumu’s research is guided by two central questions:
How do intersecting structural adversities shape sexual and mental health inequities among forcibly displaced and migrant youth across key mobility transitions?
And,
How can co-designed multimodal digitally enabled interventions integrated into health and social service systems disrupt these pathways?
These central questions are deeply rooted in Dr. Okumu’s personal experiences and observations, which vividly illuminated the critical scientific gaps he is now working to address.
Dr. Okumu reflects on his background: “Growing up in an eastern border town between Kenya and Uganda, I saw constant movement as people crossed borders for work, school, trade, and safety reasons.” Reflecting on that early experience, he notes: “While mobility offers opportunity, it also critically amplifies vulnerability.”
He adds, “In this setting, I witnessed the devastating impact of HIV/AIDS, observing how migration, stigma, poverty, substance misuse and limited health information converged to exacerbate the health crisis.” He also observed how young people navigating this migratory life were often overlooked: “young people moving between communities often fall outside formal health systems and are rendered invisible by the very institutions meant to protect them. Prevention messages often didn’t reach young people on their journeys. Care was fragmented, and their mobility was relentlessly shadowed by silence, uncertainties, and stigma.”
This foregrounded understanding of health challenges that mobile populations faced, deepened after Dr. Okumu began working in internally displaced persons camps during the 20-year civil war in Northern Uganda. There, he observed how displacement intensified a grim syndemic of crises: high HIV prevalence and substance misuse, teenage pregnancy, gender-based violence, untreated trauma and extreme poverty. Crucially, these were not isolated challenges but rather interconnected crises, mutually reinforcing their devastating effects, particularly among young people who were navigating instability.
Therefore, Dr. Okumu’s research now focuses on designing and evaluating digital and community-based innovations to address these syndemic conditions. These interventions are co-created with youth to enhance access and resilience in contexts where traditional services do not accommodate mobility risks.
While developing his program of research, Dr. Okumu recognized that standard tools from high-income settings often failed to reflect the realities faced by mobile populations. In these contexts, basic communication tools like phone sharing and digital surveillance determine how one accesses, interprets, and responds to health signals.
Dr. Okumu’s research combines several approaches: analyzing underlying societal problems (structural analysis), creating culturally relevant ways to measure health inequity (psychometrics), involving communities in designing solutions (participatory design), and studying how best to put these solutions into practice (implementation science). This comprehensive approach drives evidence-based, system-level changes for mobile populations.
Conducting rigorous research in contexts of structural instability presents significant challenges for Dr. Okumu and his team. As he describes, “forcibly displaced youth often navigate precarious employment, mobility and fragmented access to services.”
Recognizing that conventional research models, which assume stable follow-up and reliable infrastructure, rarely fit humanitarian settings, Dr. Okumu fundamentally adapted his approach.
“Rather than forcing populations to fit existing models, I had to fundamentally adapt the research models themselves to reflect these lived realities,” he states. “This adaptation meant integrating real-world application from the outset, designing studies that rigorously test interventions within the complex, ever-changing environments where structural instability is the norm.”
The team addressed the limitations of standard scales through rigorous psychometric validation and by developing context-specific measures tailored to the unique sociocultural and digital environments of displaced youth. Dr. Okumu explains the cultural imperatives that underpin his research: “my team has led the way in developing and rigorously validating innovative, culturally grounded measures.” These include digital health literacy instruments, disease outbreak resilience scales, depression screening, and technology-based condom negotiation scales, all specifically designed for these unique contexts. He notes, “Our design principles inherently incorporate pathways for broad dissemination and sustainable implementation, ensuring structural reforms rather than temporary solutions.”
“Global health research also operates within structural asymmetries,” Dr. Okumu continues. “Funding, authorship, and institutional power are often concentrated in high-income settings. My work seeks to address this by embedding shared analytical authority with community collaborators, while remaining attentive to the broader political economy shaping research production.”
For Dr. Okumu, global social work is indispensable, centering on its core purpose: addressing the structural roots of inequity in contexts shaped by migration, conflict, and economic instability. He explains, “These youth, navigating the complex intersections of humanitarian, digital, and financial systems, expose profound institutional misalignments with mobility and reveal policy failures that tragically disregard lived realities.” He feels an obligation to the young people he serves, emphasizing that global social work means more than service delivery; “It is about institutional redesign so that systems recognize lived expertise and accommodate mobility, rather than penalizing it.”
He validates his research agenda as follows, “My research generates rigorous evidence that directly drives and shapes national and regional policies.” For example, Dr Okumu explains that their research findings have been instrumental in integrating digital HIV self-testing into Uganda’s national refugee response and establishing digital health literacy as a recognized critical component of well-being within policy frameworks. This exemplifies how local insights can directly drive systemic changes. By connecting community knowledge with scientific rigor and policy engagement, global social work transforms policy and improves lives on a large scale, creating a direct path from lived experience to systemic transformation and global equity.”
Community partnerships are central to Dr. Okumu’s research program, and he actively leads and cultivates these collaborations in Uganda. For Dr. Okumu, forcibly displaced youth serve as invaluable co-researchers and peer navigators whose lived expertise is integrated into intervention design. Furthermore, he spearheads collaborations with key stakeholders, including refugee-led organizations, the Ugandan Ministry of Health, and the Office of the Prime Minister, strategically aligning his team’s work with existing systems to ensure the maximum scalability and impact of their work.
While describing the dimensions of his research, Dr. Okumu explains it like this; “My program thrives on interdisciplinary collaboration across public health, implementation science, digital innovation, and financial capability,” he said. “This synergy has directly enabled the pioneering of novel integrated intervention models and population-level analytic tools, yielding scientific insights that transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries. In this work, collaboration is integral to both knowledge production and impact.
Dr. Okumu has a positive outlook on the future of global social work and its potential to create lasting change. “I am encouraged by the growing recognition that equity requires a structural transformation grounded in contextual precision,” he said. “Advances in digital innovation, geospatial analytics, and participatory methods create new opportunities to address syndemic risks in an integrated and responsive manner.”
Looking ahead, Dr. Okumu states: “My future research will expand integrated models. These will leverage digital health innovation, such as artificial intelligence, immersive technologies, geofencing apps, and digital comic books. They will also focus on structural empowerment, including access to information, resources, support, and opportunities. Finally, the research will continually refine contextualized measures within humanitarian settings. As digital interventions scale, it is essential that metrics reflect the lived realities of mobility, gender inequality, surveillance, and digital precarity.
“Reflecting on lessons from my childhood, I find this growing recognition of lived experience as essential to effective system design as the most promising avenue for creating scientifically sound and equitable solutions. When communities most impacted by inequity are involved in shaping both research and implementation, global social work can transcend merely reducing harm to genuinely transforming institutions, thereby building a more just world from the ground up and fostering lasting scientific and policy impact.”