Throughout March, we're sitting down with Reubenite women, past and present, to talk about how they're going to be #MakingHistory.
We're starting with Anita Makori, an alumna who studied for an MSc in International Health and Tropical Medicine at Reuben College. She's determined to make a meaningful impact on global health.
Changing the face of global health
My name is Anita, I'm a Health Data Scientist, and I'm using my strengths to improve global health. Health is very multifaceted; we require people with different expertise, different backgrounds. My strength lies in numbers, and that’s why I’m in data analytics – but data analytics in health.
Resources are finite, but health challenges are infinite. My passion is using my expertise and capabilities in analytics to inform evidence-based decision-making, ensuring health equity for all.
Working to eradicate HIV, Tuberculosis and Malaria
I'm currently a Data Analyst at The Global Fund to HIV, Tuberculosis (TB) and Malaria, a global organisation devoted to fighting these top three deadliest infectious diseases in the world.
Our mission is to help contribute to a world free of these diseases, to equitable health for all, and to do health system strengthening in the countries we support. Within The Global Fund's Strategy and Policy Hub, my current work involves analysing:
- Disease burden data to understand global trends and monitor how disease burden has progressed over time.
- Data on countries' economic capacities to pinpoint where more support is needed in the fight against these diseases.
- Data on different finance sources and how they're being utilised.
I bring it all together and make sense of it to inform the decisions that are made to support various countries.
What global health equity means to me
Health is a fundamental right. For me, global health equity means everyone everywhere having access to the health services they need, when they need them, as they need them, without barriers. In the world's current state, not everyone has that.
The experiences I saw back home in Kenya were my motivation behind choosing my career path. We have very preventable diseases, but people die because they don't have access to the ways proven to prevent them. Especially children - it’s just so heart-breaking.
Oxford, Reuben College and my Master's degree
My undergraduate finished during the height of the pandemic in 2020. Before coming to Oxford, I did some work advising the Kenyan Ministry of Health in the COVID-19 pandemic response and then learnt about the research that was being done in Oxford, especially in the vaccine development space and infectious disease modelling. I wanted to come and learn about the people who are doing this work, so I could implement it back home and elsewhere.
Reuben, as the University's newest college, drew me in. I thought, ‘Okay. New means unique, new means different.’ And that’s for sure. I’m so glad that I was at Reuben because we maintain the old charm (the college has many heritage buildings), but we do things very differently.
As for the MSc in International Health and Tropical Medicine, it sets itself apart from other Master’s degrees in public or global health because they bring in interdisciplinary fields and teach how to apply them in health. You’re trained in negotiation, communication, stakeholder engagement; then, you also have basic research skills. You bring all of this together, appraise evidence, then see how it can be applied to different contexts.
How I'm #MakingHistory
I believe I’m already making history. But, for the future, my mission is to keep leveraging my unique strengths to influence how decisions are made in health.
Historically, especially back home in Kenya, some decisions are not made informed by evidence. That is just circumstantial, but I’d like to change that. I’ve already started, but I want to do it in an even more impactful way through creating that culture of utilising data in all health decisions.
Data is king - it informs what you do in a way that you just can’t without it - and I think that it’s high time that we recognise that.
