Abiy Seifu Estifanos is a public health specialist with 15 years of experience in design, implementation, and evaluation of maternal and newborn health, quality improvement, and health systems strengthening programs. He teaches newborn and child health courses to public health and health sciences students; and leads large scale observational, randomized controlled trial, and implementation research project. Abiy also advises the ministry of health and health development partners in Ethiopia and the World Health Organization in Geneva on newborn and child health research, program design and evaluation.
Currently, Abiy leads a consortium of global and national research partners supporting the Ministry of Health and six Regional Health Bureaus in Ethiopia to implement the Saving Little Lives (SLL) project, a large-scale project funded by the Global Financing Facility and coordinated by UNICEF Ethiopia. The project is designed to accelerate the scale-up of package of interventions for preterm and low birth weight babies across 290 hospitals in Ethiopia.
In addition, Abiy leads other large-scale projects run by the center including
Optimizing place of treatment and antibiotic regimens for young infants presenting with signs of possible serious bacterial infection: a multi-country Randomized Controlled Clinical Trial. 2021 – 2023 (Funded by BMGF and coordinated by World Health Organization)
Implementation Research to Scale-up and Evaluate the Impact of Antenatal Corticosteroids on Preterm Newborn Outcomes: a multi-country implementation research. 2022 – 2027 (Funded by BMGF and coordinated by World Health Organization)
Implementation research to accelerated scale-up of immediate Kangaroo Mother Care in Ethiopia: a multi-center implementation research. 2023 – 2026 (Funded by BMGF and coordinated by World Health Organization)
Implementation research to accelerate scale-up of specialized lactation support to optimize breastmilk feeding practices and nutritional outcomes among preterm and/or low-birth-weight infants, Ethiopia (Funded by BMGF and coordinated by Addis Ababa University)
Publications: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6833-9823