Like many people from Zimbabwe Tendesayi Kufa has a large extended family. And like many people growing up in Zimbabwe during the 1990s, her life was touched all too often by HIV and TB. As a young person she lost several cousins to TB/HIV co-infection.

So when Tendesayi completed her medical degree at the University Of Zimbabwe College Of Health Sciences in 2001 she was already thinking about how she could personally help stem the epidemic. For the first three years of her career, she provided medical care for people living with HIV, first through work at government hospitals and later through a clinic operated by the Spanish branch of Médecins Sans Frontières.

After completing her Masters in Public Health at the University of California Berkeley, on a scholarship from the John E. Fogarty International Center of the US National Institutes of Health, she came to South Africa and joined the AURUM Institute, an NGO that conducts research on HIV and TB. With funding from PEPFAR, she has helped designed and will soon lead a study that will seek to provide evidence that patients benefit when HIV and TB services are integrated.

In South Africa, TB and HIV services are "nested" separately with government-run primary care clinics. Tendesayi’s 's team will seek to create strong links between the two services, to ensure that all TB patients are offered HIV testing and appropriate HIV treatment; and that all HIV patients receive TB screening and TB treatment or preventive treatment as appropriate. Reduced hospitalizations among patients in the study group, compared to those not receiving integrated services, will be the measure of success.

She sees this research only as one important first step. "I am hopeful our findings will be positive, but you have to translate findings into programmes that help people."

Her vision: a world where no person dies from TB.