My Global Health Journey
I knew I wanted to have a career in global health since I was 17, I just didn’t know the term back then. As a sixth form student, my plan was to do a gap year working on an HIV/Aids project somewhere in Africa then return to the UK to go to university before heading back to Africa.
Fast forward 18 years, I had what most would consider as a successful global health career. I had lived in Liberia and Haiti for five years managing large scale public health projects. I held senior management positions in prominent global health organisations in the UK travelling regularly to visit the health projects I managed across the globe. In 2020, at the height of the Covid pandemic, I was a Deputy Project Director of a multi-million pound blindness prevention project across Western and Central Africa.
But I threw in the towel and left my career in global health. Why would I do such a thing? Well, it was a decision that was 18 years in the making.
As I progressed through the ranks professionally, I became increasingly uncomfortable as a black woman being complicit in a system that upholds white supremacy. Global health as with much of the international development sector is seeped in white saviourism and the rhetoric that white is right. White-led, Western based international organisations and funding bodies hold, wield and sometimes abuse power. They call the shots, they set the global health agenda with the expectation that low and middle income countries fall in line to access much needed funding and implement projects based on Western metrics and measures of success. My black and brown colleagues in low- and middle-income countries are the real experts with the contextual knowledge and expertise to speak on the health challenges in their countries but in decision-making fora they are side-lined, their voices muted or they aren’t even in the room at all. Sitting in meetings where critical decisions were made through the white gaze, I would continually advocate on behalf of my black and brown colleagues and those who would benefit from these projects but even as a senior staff member, my lone black voice carried little weight in a sea of whiteness.
I encountered “group think” in the homogeneous Western headquartered organisations (read white, middle class) that I worked in, making it almost impossible to gain approval for my ideas to be executed. I constantly felt othered for my divergent views. Independent Scholar L. Smith sums up white supremacy within the sector “…the White, western, colonial perspective is the one that is legitimised by many western institutions, individuals with a White, western, colonial lens operate under the assumption that their worldview is the standard, is the norm, and everything outside of that is thereby ipso facto an anomaly, a deviation from the norm”.
With disappointment, frustration and exhaustion fighting a system that was intentionally designed to elevate whiteness, I walked away from a career I had built over nearly 20 years. I often wonder if I would have walked away if I was a white woman. One of the reasons JM and I started this website is to engage in the global discourse around rethinking global health. We’ve had many conversations over the years around global health and with our combined 25+ years’ experience, we bring differing perspectives based on the space we occupy in the global health sector- JM as a “local” and myself as an “international” staff member- language I am still grappling with as it reinforces the power imbalance and hierarchy within the sector. What we do agree on is that we want to be part of the solution to do things differently. Let’s be clear, we know this won’t happen overnight. This is a life’s work dismantling oppressive systems and structures that perpetuate harm but we have to start somewhere. We’re excited for you to join us on this journey, but more importantly join the movement to rethink global health and disrupt the status quo. To quote the late John Lewis “We have been too quiet for too long. There comes a time when you have to say something. You have to make a little noise. You have to move your feet. This is the time.”