Peter Ahabwe Babigumira is a pharmacist with Health diplomacy, health system strengthening and public health technical expertise. His research focuses on Bio-security, Antimicrobial Resistance and emergency preparedness. He works with the Infectious Diseases Institute at the College of Health Sciences, Makerere University.
He serves with the secretariat for Uganda’s co-chair with the Africa CDC of the Global Health Security Agenda Action package on Bio-safety and Bio-security for 2021/2022. He served in a similar capacity in 2019/2020 period as Uganda chaired the Action package on Antimicrobial Resistance.
He is attached to the Uganda Ministry of Health Public Health Emergency Operations Centre (PHEOC) as a Technical Advisor for Emergency Preparedness and Response. He coordinates the surge team at COVID-19 situation room, a specialized PHEOC for COVID-19. He supports international health regulation implementation, monitoring and evaluation. He actively participated in the organization and conducting of Joint external evaluation, After Action Review and simulation exercises.
During a Global technical consultation on pandemic preparedness in 2018, He took the initiative to secure Uganda’s participation in a pilot program for WHO support for pandemic preparedness even though we were not part of the original pilot. After two successful workshops we completed a situational analysis and drafted a respiratory pathogen preparedness and response plan. These documents served as the basis for our response during the COVID-19 pandemic.
His work as and Epidemic intelligence analyst was key in the identification of what we now refer to as SARS CoV 2 in January 2020 through tweet deck and it’s prioritization for action by the National task force. He currently leads Event based surveillance for Bacterial meningitis and Chemical Biological Radio-logical and Nuclear events through Epidemic Intelligence from Open Sources system.
He supports Risk Assessment, Contingency Planning, Training and coordination. He also actively supports the work of the Incident Commander’s Incident Management Teams for COVID-19 and past Ebola virus disease outbreaks. Recent projects include development and implementation of a public health emergency management training curriculum for district health leadership. This has been adapted and used for orientation of new regional EOC’s and NGO teams.
In addition to completing several onsite and remote certificate trainings. Peter received a Bachelor of Pharmacy in 2013 from Mbarara University of Science and Technolog