Professor Etowa's community-based research (CBR) program includes studies on health equity, perinatal health, COVID-19, HIV/AIDS, nurses' work lives, and community nursing. With hundreds of scholarly publications, workshops, talks, and dozens of accolades, her academic record speaks for itself and makes her community contributions even more impressive.
Her seminal contributions to understanding the determinants of health inequities and healthcare access and innovative solutions to address health inequities along ethno-racial lines, promote healthy behaviours for perinatal health, and enhance cultural competence in Canada and abroad. She helped develop a centre that offers graduate degrees in public health, midwifery, and nursing in Nigeria. Through this centre, she helped to build health research capacity in that country and foster evidence-informed policies. Underpinning her CBR in Canada is authentic engagement, capacity building, and integrated knowledge mobilization with Black communities and stakeholders. She has established two community organizations that advance health equity for Black Canadians and a CBR lab focused on equity, transformative change, reciprocal mentoring, and community empowerment. She has mentored over 100 Black people in the community, many of whom now hold influential positions in Canada's provincial and federal governments. To further community-led action on health, her current research aims to develop best practice guidelines for research, data management, and knowledge mobilization to be genuinely led by Black communities. Hearty Cheers.
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