The Skoll Foundation Board of Directors and team is proud to announce Dr. Raj Panjabi, CEO of Last Mile Health and world-class social entrepreneur, as its newest Board member. Raj, who is also Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, brings deep expertise in global health and social entrepreneurship, as well as an invaluable practitioner’s perspective from years of on-the-ground work to reshape inequitable systems.
Raj grew up in Liberia and fled its civil war with his family when he was nine years old, becoming a refugee in the United States. He returned to Liberia as a medical student 15 years ago. With $6000 he and his wife received as a wedding present, Raj co-founded Last Mile Health in 2007 with a team of Liberian civil war survivors and American health workers to save lives in the world’s most remote communities.
Last Mile Health partners with governments to design and build community-based primary health systems to deploy teams of community and frontline health workers to bring life-saving services—from vaccines to maternal and neonatal care—to the doorsteps of people living far from care. Following the 2013-2016 West African Ebola epidemic, Last Mile Health supported the Government of Liberia to launch the country’s first national community health worker program. Now, community health workers have conducted over 4.2 million patient visits and treat 45 percent of all reported malaria cases for children under five in rural communities served by the national program.
In 2017, Raj and the team at Last Mile Health launched the Community Health Academy to revolutionize training for community health workers and health systems leaders worldwide. Since then, the Community Health Academy has launched two leadership courses that have engaged over 27,000 learners worldwide on how to build, scale, advocate for, and finance national community health worker programs, and helped train thousands of community and frontline health workers.
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Last Mile Health has supported governments in Africa, including Liberia, Malawi, Uganda, and Ethiopia, to train and support community and frontline health workers to prevent, detect, and respond to the pandemic, while continuing to provide access to primary health services. The organization is also working to prioritize and protect community and frontline health workers in the global response. Raj has directly cared for patients with COVID-19 and other urgent health care needs in the United States and Africa.
Raj also serves as Technical Advisor to Liberia’s former President, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, in her role as co-Chair with former Prime Minister Helen Clark, on the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response at the World Health Organization (WHO).
He was named by TIME as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World and one of the 50 Most Influential People in Healthcare. He has been listed as one of the World’s 50 Greatest Leaders by Fortune Magazine. Raj is a recipient of the TED Prize, Clinton Global Citizen Award for leadership in response to the West Africa Ebola epidemic, the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship, and is a Schwab Social Entrepreneur at the World Economic Forum.
A graduate of the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, Raj trained in internal medicine and primary care at Massachusetts General Hospital & Harvard Medical School and received a Master of Public Health in epidemiology from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
“I am thrilled to join the Board of the Skoll Foundation, particularly at this important inflection point in the movement for global health equity,” said Raj Panjabi. “The Skoll Foundation is well-placed to help catalyze the systems-level change needed to ensure that access to healthcare is a right equally enjoyed by all, not a privilege. The scale of interconnected problems we face requires the kind of systemic approach the Foundation has supported, and I’m honored to help chart its path forward.”
“Raj’s expertise in global health equity, health systems strengthening, and social entrepreneurship is unparalleled,” said Don Gips, CEO of the Skoll Foundation. “We’ve learned so much from Raj since he received the Skoll Award in 2017. His experience and ability to leverage the strengths of potential collaborators will serve the Skoll Foundation and our partners well as we aim to respond swiftly and strategically to the COVID-19 crisis and the many other urgent and interrelated global challenges. Raj will also provide great wisdom on how Skoll can best support its community of grantees, which include social entrepreneurs driving transformational social change.”
Listen to Raj describe his path to become a leader in global health equity in this episode of our Role Models for Change podcast.
