By William Opio
Many Ugandan children fear visits to the hospital for one reason: the injection. Even when they don’t feel too sick, parents may insist on their visit to the hospital. But Christine Simiyu was different. Rather than avoid hospitals, she often accompanied older relatives on their visits.
She remembers watching nurses and doctors closely and admiring how they helped people recover. That early experience later shaped her decision to pursue a career in healthcare.
“I often thought being a nurse or doctor was something prestigious,” she says.
Even when people misunderstood her interest in hospitals, she says she remained focused. Her uncle eventually noticed her passion and began guiding her toward a medical career.
Today, Simiyu is a respected nursing professional and public health practitioner who has worked as an academic, government health systems professional and a leader in international health programs.
She grew up in a large and hardworking family. Her father was a successful farmer with large pieces of land and kept many animals.
Despite this, life at home was not easy.
Every child had responsibilities. Before going to school, Simiyu and her siblings had to work in the garden. After school, they returned to more work before doing household chores.
“There was no easy life,” she recalls. “We were taught that everything must be worked for.”
This discipline shaped her early thinking. She learned responsibility, patience and the value of effort. These lessons stayed with her into adulthood, earning her a job even before joining university. She was recruited by the government in 2005 as a civil servant in Sironko District, eastern Uganda.
She later joined Uganda Christian University (UCU), where she studied Bachelor of Nursing Science from 2009 to 2011. “At UCU, you had to work hard; there was no room for laziness.”
She says the university taught her both academic and practical skills. At the institution, students are frequently sent to hospitals for hands-on training, where they work closely with patients and health professionals.
Simiyu’s dedication earned her a teaching assistant position at UCU upon graduation. From 2012 to 2014, she taught nursing students, guiding them through difficult medical subjects and practical training.
She says teaching helped her grow.
“When you teach others, you improve your knowledge of the subject.”
While serving as a teaching assistant at UCU, Simiyu continued working with the government health system in Sironko District. Her work exposed her to the realities of healthcare delivery in rural Uganda, including staff shortages, limited transport and long distances patients had to travel to access services.
She was later promoted from working at a health facility to the district headquarters, where she coordinated maternal and child health services.
To broaden her knowledge of the medical field, Simiyu pursued a Master of Public Health, which she completed in 2015 at the International Health Sciences University, now Clarke International University in Uganda.
After her studies, Simiyu rose to a senior position in the district health system, managing maternal and child health programs. Her work involved supporting health centers, training health workers and working with communities to improve health outcomes.
One of her major areas of focus was the welfare of mothers and children. She also worked in the Elimination of Mother-to-Child Transmission of HIV program, helping HIV-positive mothers give birth to HIV-negative babies. She was part of the team that helped formulate Uganda’s revised antenatal care guidelines, which shifted the country from four goal-oriented antenatal visits to the current recommendation of eight contacts during pregnancy.
One of her key achievements was working with Traditional Birth Attendants (TBAs). Instead of removing them from the system, she helped transform them into referral agents who encouraged mothers to visit health facilities, reducing maternal deaths and increasing safe deliveries in health centers.
TBAs are community-based women who assist expectant mothers with pregnancy and childbirth outside the formal medical system. They often provide culturally rooted support and delivery services within communities.
Simiyu says the initiative began after she realized that many mothers were choosing to deliver at home rather than in health facilities.
“We would find health facilities with very few mothers, yet TBAs were attending to many deliveries in the community,” she says.
TBAs were subsequently trained to understand the risks associated with home deliveries and encouraged to refer expectant mothers to health facilities. The approach significantly increased facility-based deliveries and strengthened trust between communities and healthcare providers.
She credits the strategy with helping improve maternal and child health indicators across the region.
Later, Simiyu joined USAID-supported programs, where her work focused mainly on maternal and child health, family planning and community health education.
At USAID, she developed innovative approaches to health education. One of her most successful strategies involved using real-life success stories from people who had benefited from family planning services to educate others. The approach helped increase awareness and acceptance of family planning among families and communities.
Her innovations and experiences in community health led to opportunities beyond routine program implementation. She wrote and presented several abstracts at Uganda’s National Safe Motherhood Conferences, sharing lessons from maternal and child health interventions.
Her work also gained international recognition. Drawing on successful community-based health approaches, she presented abstracts at international conferences, including a major conference in Pattaya, Thailand, where she presented three papers on family planning and maternal and child health services.
As her experience and leadership grew, Simiyu was promoted to regional leadership roles, overseeing health programs across multiple districts. As a regional technical lead, she coordinated services, managed resources and supported district health teams throughout the region.
She says the role sharpened her leadership, planning and coordination skills while helping her understand the unique strengths and challenges of different districts.
“It taught me how to support people, manage resources and work with different partners to achieve common goals.”
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