Gloria Kahamba was recently named among the Top 25 Women in Management Africa and was featured in 9to5Chick’s Top 100 Career Women in Africa, which testifies to the leader she has become on the African continent. She was a Mastercard Foundation Scholar at UC Berkeley, earning her master’s degree in Public Health.
Gloria has always been passionate about healthcare, and her initial career focus was medicine, which led her to obtain a B.A. in Human Ecology, Pre-Medical and Health Studies from College of the Atlantic. As an undergraduate she volunteered at several hospitals and interned at the Jackson Laboratory in Maine and the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare in Tanzania. After exploring different career paths, she decided to pursue a Master of Public Health to broaden her skills and work on preventative measures on a larger scale against infectious diseases, opting for UC Berkeley as one of the top schools in the discipline. The Mastercard Foundation Scholars Program through the Center for African Studies at UC Berkeley only made her choice easier.
At UC Berkeley, Gloria was able to intern with UC San Francisco, the UC campus dedicated exclusively to healthcare that often collaborates with UC Berkeley. Through working with UC San Francisco, Gloria conducted research in Namibia on malaria trends in fourteen health facilities. Gloria describes this internship as a wonderful experience, and her master’s thesis, “Malaria Surveillance in Namibia: A Retrospective Study and Implications for Elimination,” emerged from her work during this time. She interviewed, supervised, and trained the data collection team, then analyzed the data and reported the results as part of her thesis.
Gloria relates that she also gained valuable experience at Berkeley while living at the International House, where most Mastercard Foundation Scholars reside. “The International House contributed a lot to my experience at Berkeley. I was able to do so much at that house with others, working with the Program Office and preparing events. The people I met there are still my friends. It certainly helped my career too because the work that I did in the Program Office was coordinating and organizing events, and my first job was Project Coordinator.” Therefore, although a student of healthcare, Gloria was able to develop her management skills that she has now been recognized for through other avenues.
As Gloria transitioned from life as a graduate student to her career in Africa, she desired to contribute to her home community with the skills and education she received in the United States. This was her goal since she began her undergraduate education. “When I finished at Berkeley, the transition was a bit easier than it may have been for someone who stayed abroad for many years. When it came to searching for jobs, someone advised me that when you come back home it might be easier because you can physically go to places, so that’s what I did when I came back home. I didn’t even apply to jobs in the U.S. because I already knew I was going back home.”
Gloria began as Project Coordinator at D-tree, a non-profit digital health organization that focuses on improving the access and delivery of quality healthcare to those in need by leveraging digital technology to facilitate better decision-making. A significant part of this role involved designing different innovations such as applications, systems, and data visualization dashboards. Gloria did not know much about digital health when she joined this team but learned quickly how to develop logical applications and dashboards on D-tree’s platforms. She would then go into the field to train healthcare workers on using D-tree’s applications and tools. One digital system, for example, described as “m-mama,” helps improve access to maternal care for pregnant women and babies by connecting them with reliable private drivers in addition to the limited ambulance services. Other systems, such as “Afya-Tek,” help healthcare workers arrive at diagnoses by guiding them through protocols for symptom assessment and referrals. Currently D-tree is also intervening to increase communication and healthcare data sharing between healthcare providers in communities and more distant healthcare facilities. D-tree’s digital tools are freely available to use and have been so beneficial that the Tanzanian mainland and Zanzibari governments have adopted them for broader use.
As her interest in management increased, Gloria advanced to the position of Deputy County Director and is now County Director, working closely with the Government of Tanzania as she oversees the team and projects, informing decisions at an organizational level to support the country’s healthcare system. She is a lifelong learner and cherishes the opportunities to grow and expand her skillset that this higher role affords her. Some of Gloria’s accomplishments that she is most proud of include strengthening ties between D-tree and the Tanzanian government as D-tree expanded; she has influenced the internal structure of her team based on objectives for reaching goals and developing her team’s talents. Gloria’s spiritual faith continues to be her foundation as she works to improve the lives of many.
Photos below courteously provided by D-tree.
