Mary Kawonga

Mary Kawonga is a Public Health Physician and Associate Professor in Community Health at the School of Public Health, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. She is an implementation researcher, lecturer, postgraduate research supervisor, and service delivery partner who is passionate about finding approaches to enhance women’s health service delivery and outcomes.

She has been working on cervical cancer prevention in South Africa for several years, primarily supporting sub-national program managers on the technical aspects of service delivery, contributing to national cervical cancer prevention policy development, and conducting health service evaluation and implementation research on secondary prevention of cervical cancer. Prof Kawonga’s research focuses on understanding contextual barriers hampering implementation of cancer prevention interventions and testing solutions to overcome these bottlenecks.

She is currently leading a project to evaluate the implementation effectiveness of integrating a pre-cancer treatment intervention into primary care services and provide evidence on contextual strategies to enhance the adoption and implementation of primary care-driven pre-cancer treatment in South Africa. This project aims to improve the coverage of and enhance women’s access to cervical pre-cancer treatment in a context where too many women who need this life-saving intervention cannot access it.