Foege Fellows
The first William H. Foege Fellows show promise in making a significant impact on health in the developing world.

The first class of William H. Foege fellows in Global Health represents the full spectrum of public health-medicine, environmental health, community-based prevention, and data management. They arrived this past August full of anticipation for all they would learn in two years at RSPH. Meanwhile, RSPH faculty and students are eagerly anticipating all they have to learn from these seasoned public health professionals.

Last year, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation gave $5 million, its first ever endowment gift, to establish the William H. Foege Fellowships in Global Health at RSPH, honoring the achievements of Bill Foege, Presidential Distinguished Professor of International Health at RSPH and former senior adviser to the foundation. Each year, the programs will support four Foege Fellows to earn master's degrees in international health at RSPH. The fellows are mid-career professionals from developing countries who will develop lasting partnerships with mentors at Atlanta-based public health agencies, including Emory, The Carter Center, CDC, Care, and the Task Force for Child Survival and Development. This year's fellowship nominations came from The Carter Center and CARE USA.

Pictured with William Foege (center), from left to right: Ayman Elsheikh has helped bring the quantitative tools of modern public health to Sudan, establishing data collection and analysis systems to track infectious and parasitic diseases. Rose Zambezi has brought together many different, and often contrary, constituencies to carry out aggressive HIV-AIDS prevention programs in Zambia, where the rate of HIV infection may be as high as 20%. Martin Swaka has run hospitals with no little or no electricity in war-torn south Sudan, managing everything from childbirth to mass gunshot casualties. Sadi Moussa has engineered clean water supplies for much of Niger and helped bring the eradication of guinea worm within sight.

"Global health equity, in the final analysis, will require skilled public health workers in every developing country to have global support and a scientific environment that allows them to use their skills and knowledge for the benefit of their people," says Bill Foege. "These fellowships link promising people with organizations capable of providing that support."

Fellow Martin Swaka completed his medical education in Egypt, and then worked as a senior medical officer for three hospitals run by Norwegian Peoples Aid in Sudan. His responsibilities included just about anything that needed doing. He examined patients in the clinic, managed budgets and personnel, performed elective and emergency surgeries, including frequent war casualties. For the past two years, he has served as medical coordinator for CARE Somalia/South Sudan, coordinating emergency response teams to manage 21,000 people displaced by war and supervising medical programs to contain and prevent infectious and parasitic diseases.

"Operating our program for CARE in South Sudan is not an easy task," he says. "Because of civil conflict, the country's basic infrastructure, especially for health care, has collapsed. Secondary health services are nonexistent. We can't manage chronic diseases because we have no equipment. We end up sending patients to Kenya or Uganda, which is very expensive. Our infant and maternal mortality rates are very high because we have no facilities to do a basic C-section."

Swaka is already thinking about the future. "Our first challenge is endemic diseases like sleeping sickness, onchoceriasis (river blindness), guinea worm, and malaria. Before the war, the prevalence of sleeping sickness was 5%. But after the war it was 19%. Our program with CARE reduced it to about 2%."

Sadi Moussa has high hopes for his country as well and plans to concentrate on environmental health at RSPH. "The largest health problems in Niger are preventable-things like diarrheal disease and guinea worm, which are related to the lack of safe water," he says. "Niger's health policy is aimed at treatment, not prevention, and hopefully I can be in a position to help change that."

He earned his degree in environmental engineering in Algeria and has earned certificates in epidemiology, water and sanitation, and sustainable management development. He has worked as national coordinator for the Niger Guinea Worm Eradication Project for the past 10 years, working closely with The Carter Center. He has also served as director of hygiene, sanitation and prevention for the Niger Ministry of Health and participated in the development of the Niger National Health Plan.

Rose Zambezi has managed large adolescent sexual and reproductive health projects for CARE for eight years and worked for the Planned Parenthood Association of Zambia for nine years. For the past two years, she has coordinated youth reproductive health and HIV prevention programs for YouthNet, which is run by Family Health International in Washington, D.C. She has also worked as a community partnerships specialist for CARE and USAID, helping develop, manage, and implement community-based intervention projects to prevent HIV, malaria, and diarrheal diseases. She earned bachelor's degrees in sociology and public administration from the University of Zambia and a master's degree in population studies from the University of Exeter in Great Britain.

She hopes to return to Zambia after her time at RSPH and focus on international health management, specifically program implementation and evaluation. She also hopes to learn more proposal and grant writing skills so she can bring her country more money for public health issues.

Ayman Elsheikh's career has focused on public health informatics, and he is considered a pioneer in making data accessible and understandable for health program managers in Sudan. He earned a degree in electronic engineering in Khartoum and went on to study communication technology, data management systems, and health mapping in Egypt, Great Britain, the United States, and Switzerland. His career in health began in 1995, when he became an information technology officer for Save the Children. Since 1996, he has worked for The Carter Center as a program analyst and data manager for the Global 2000/Khartoum office.

Elsheikh's training at Emory could make him a key player in the rebuilding of Sudan's decimated public health system, wrote officials for The Carter Center in their nomination of Elsheikh for the fellowship."He is already doing significant work, and as a Foege fellow he would share that experience and knowledge with the Atlanta public health community," wrote Executive Director John Hardman and Donald Hopkins, associate executive director for programs. "We believe Ayman would return to Sudan at a turning point in his country's history. His contributions to health, peace, and information technology could be considerable."

Programs like the Foege fellowships exemplify the power of partnerships, say CARE officials. "The continued need to enhance the skills and capacity of public health leaders in the developing world, especially those working with policy and service delivery interventions for those in abject poverty, is critical," says Dr. James Sarn, director of the Health Unit at CARE. "Establishing lasting relationships with public health organizations like the CDC, The Carter Center, Morehouse, and CARE is of great value to both the fellows and the people they serve in their communities."

By Valerie Gregg, former editor of this magazine and a freelance writer in Atlanta