On July 4, 2024, the Ifakara Health Institute hosted a one-day training session on the basics of R, focusing on data manipulation and visualization. The training took place at the National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR) – Mabibo office in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The session attracted nine participants from various institutions, including the Ministry of Health (MoH), NIMR, Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Centre (KCMC), and Hong Kong University (HKU).

The training, conducted by Ifakara's Data Science and Modelling for Decision Making (DM4DM) team led by Gloria Shirima and Nicholaus Mziray, focused on two main areas within R, a programming language for statistical computing and data visualization. These areas were Data Manipulation with dplyr, a package that simplifies common tasks to make data cleaning and organization easier, and Data Visualization with ggplot, an open-source package used to create detailed and customizable visualizations.

Participants engaged in interactive sessions and hands-on activities to learn how to read, clean, transform data, and create visualizations. Gloria Shirima led the instructional segments, while Nicholaus Mziray provided individual support to ensure a comprehensive understanding of the material.

Feedback from the participants was highly positive, with many highlighting the well-structured content and practical approach of the training. The session successfully enhanced the R programming skills of the attendees, achieving its objective.

The DM4DM team looks forward to offering more such training sessions in the future to further strengthen data science skills.