Kassimu Tani is a Research Scientist in the Health Systems, Interventions, Impact Evaluation & Policy department at Ifakara Health Institute. An economist by training, Mr. Tani specializes in health system and policy research with a focus on health and environmental economics. With over 14 years of experience in health research, his work primarily addresses maternal and child health, health financing, costing, and economic evaluations.

He has significant expertise in health system and policy research, particularly in health financing, costing, and cost-effectiveness analysis. His core experience includes managing research programs funded by various donors, developing and managing research protocols, and analyzing and interpreting both qualitative and quantitative data.

Before joining Ifakara Health Institute in 2010, Mr. Tani worked as a District Planning Officer/Economist at Mafia District Council and as a Research Assistant on the Coast Fisheries Project, where he laid the foundation for his research career by assessing the "sustainable exploitation of marine FIFISH resources" for his master’s thesis. Since 2010, he has contributed to multiple projects aimed at evaluating and understanding the health system challenges within Tanzania’s healthcare setting.

Mr. Tani’s research interests include maternal and child health, non-communicable diseases, gender, health financing, costing, and policy analysis. His primary focus is on understanding how health policies impact the availability and utilization of health services in Tanzania’s health system. He has contributed to over 20 publications in the fields of health financing and health policy.

Mr. Tani has contributed to several impactful projects throughout his career. Between 2018 and 2019, through IHI, he worked with ThinkWell on the ICAN immunization costing project in Tanzania, which aimed to increase the visibility, availability, understanding, and use of immunization delivery costing evidence. His role involved organizing data collection, conducting analysis, writing reports, and disseminating findings. In 2016-2017, he collaborated with the Mwanza Intervention Trial Unit and the London School of Tropical Hygiene and Medicine to conduct an economic evaluation of a health system strengthening intervention in Tanzania and Uganda. The intervention aimed to improve the provision of services for non-communicable diseases, such as HIV, diabetes, and hypertension. Mr. Tani's responsibilities included facilitating the economic evaluation, analyzing costs, and summarizing the results.

From 2010 to 2016, Mr. Tani worked on a project that IHI conducted in collaboration with Columbia University to evaluate the deployment of paid community health workers in rural Tanzania’s health systems. His work focused on the economic evaluation of the intervention, which included determining the cost of the program, modeling the cost of training and deploying community health workers, and conducting a time-motion study on the work activities of full-time community health workers. These diverse projects have significantly enhanced his expertise in health system evaluations, particularly in cost analysis and policy impact assessment.