Best of CASE District III Award
 

Institution: Duke University

Title of entry: Making It Work in Uganda

About this entry: Duke alumni love to hear about Duke doing good in the world, but avoiding White Savior syndrome is key. Dr. Fitzgerald combines her medical and engineering backgrounds with a desire not to solve problems in Uganda but to help build Ugandan medical capacity so they can do their own work. A story in development for more than five years (derailed by Covid), the KeySuite project probably profited from the delay. Instead of showing Duke and Ugandan students and professors designing a tool, the story was able to show how, after years of working together on design, the groups were submitting the tool for approval for human testing and ultimate use. Locals call the new surgical tool "revolutionary," and Fitzgerald looks forward to stepping back and allowing the local community to do its own work in Uganda. We sent a reporter to Uganda to get a sense of what conditions were actually like, which brought a sense of place to the story it would otherwise not have been able to have as well as the opportunity to speak with students and workers both from Duke and in Uganda.