Designing Culturally Appropriate Cognitive Tools in Resource Limited Setting: Lessons from Ethiopia's Multilingual and Culturally Diverse Context

The study emphasizes the important need for culturally adapted cognitive tools in Ethiopia. Although low literacy, stigma, and limited technology understanding pose challenges, our finding support accessibility and feasibility of neuropsychological tools for ADRD research by incorporating local languages, culturally relevant tasks, and literacy-independent assessments. Our findings inform development of culturally valid cognitive protocols by highlighting best performing internationally harmonized tasks and identifying predictors of performance. Based on our learnings, we will provide recommendations on the design of aging and ADRD studies in low resource settings in SSA including strengths and weakness of harmonized cognitive assessment protocols.