Sitan Traoré

Private image provided by Sitan Traoré

It was the sight of an onion that moved Malian scientist Sitan Traoré to pursue a career in research. A high school teacher at the time, Traoré had recently returned to Mali from Hungary, where she’d earned a bachelor’s degree in biology. She was teaching her students to use the microscope. Their first exercise: prepare a wet mount slide of the onion membrane, and identify the various structures of the cell, or organelles. Traoré recalls during that biology exercise, a student looked through the lens and was fascinated and could hardly believe her eyes. “She screamed, ‘What we could see with the microscope was exactly the same as the picture in the books!’ From that moment, I discovered my passion for research and checked if I could apply for a scholarship to do research.”

In 1989, Traoré received a scholarship from the USAID-supported African Graduate Fellowship Program (AFGRAD) to study medical entomology at the University of Tennessee in the US. Her mother had wanted her to be a nurse, she says – “she always talked about the nurse’s white blouse” – but Traoré found herself drawn to the lab.

In Tennessee, she studied the black flies of the Great Smoky Mountains. “At the time, many people in Mali had onchocerciasis (which is transmitted by the bite of an infected black fly),” she says. “But before I finished, they started using ivermectin, and oncho went away.”

Malaria, however, was still a major problem. After obtaining a second master’s degree in the US at the University of Arkansas, Traoré returned to Bamako to work on vector control with the ministry of health. She had hoped to work with a research institution, but after two years she took a job with Mali’s National Malaria Control Program (PNLP). “My dream of becoming a researcher in a laboratory was crumbling,” she says, explaining that the PNLP doesn’t have its own laboratory. “But I didn’t give up.”

Research links to national control

Indeed, at the PNLP, Traoré tasked herself with evaluating the susceptibility of the malaria vector Anopheles gambiae to insecticides in Sélingué, a high burden area two hours south of Bamako. “I reached out to the entomology department of the Malaria Research and Training Center (MRTC) for technical support,” she recalls, and her request was accepted. “With financial and technical support from WHO and the MRTC, we were for the first time able to monitor insecticide resistance at the PNLP.”

Several years later, Traoré was appointed WHO focal point for vector control responsible for coordinating research on resistance to insecticides and for training health workers in techniques to impregnate bed nets in all regions of the country. She also served as facilitator between the WHO, the MRTC, and the PNLP, and then, during the humanitarian crisis of 2012–2013, as coordinator of health activities of the International Fund for Agricultural Development. The following year, Traore finished the work she had started two decades earlier at the University of Arkansas, and returned to the NMCP a newly minted PhD.

The drive to support women in research

All the while, Traoré has done what she can to help younger colleagues, particularly women. Growing up the oldest of ten children, she learned responsibility at an early age. And as a mother of three, she knows well how hard it can be for women to balance the demands of family and career. “Women’s contributions to health research are not widely acknowledged in Mali,” she says, and with that in mind, Traoré and colleagues at the PNLP responded to TDR’s call to develop ideas on how to improve career development for women research scientists working in infectious diseases of poverty.

In February 2015, the PNLP was awarded a TDR grant to establish an inter-institutional network (RIARF) of 16 health research institutions in Mali to raise the visibility of women’s contributions to health research. The six-month pilot project also includes a capacity-building component (short-term workshops and doctoral training) designed to remove some of the barriers that prevent many women from reaching the highest rungs of the professional ladder.

“I’m now senior, and the young ladies seek me out,” says Traoré, who continues to serve as chief entomologist at the PNLP. “I read their proposals, and we try to improve things together.” Be it in Bamako or Hungary or the US, the road, she says, has been long and hard.

“As they say, life is a constant struggle.” She laments that she is “not in a laboratory, as I had hoped.” But as she has done time and again throughout her life, Traoré has found a way forward.

“Dr Sitan has been like an aunt to me,” says Djénéba Simaga, an assistant researcher in socio-anthropology and a member of RIARF who helped establish the TDR-funded network. “She is a woman of conviction and is ever prepared to support others – an honest, patient, indefatigable lady, and a model for all to follow.”

“I achieve my dream by seeing young women researchers achieve theirs,” says Traore, adding that she plans to remain a mentor long after she retires from public service later this year. “I will continue to help young women in research through the different associations and networks of which I am a member.”

For more information, contact:

Makiko Kitamura
TDR Communications Officer
Telephone: +41 22 791 2926
email: kitamuram@who.int