Hearing the Call and Building a Nonprofit
At Dartmouth, Ahmed revisited healthcare challenges in sub-Saharan Africa through a different lens while on a trip to Rwanda with Geisel faculty and other members of her cohort. “Rwanda had a very similar history with Somalia—genocide and a broken healthcare system and having to build back up. Unfortunately, Somalia is not there yet, but it gave me an opportunity to compare between two countries what can be done.”
In the MPH program, Ahmed studied the long-term effects of untreated strep infections in children, and how they can develop into rheumatic heart disease, leaving those children to become adults with serious health challenges. In Rwanda, she observed that affected children’s main healthcare contact is with community health workers, underscoring the potential of public health initiatives to make a difference in a displaced, neglected community.
The trip not only added to Ahmed’s perspective on the impact community health workers can have in sub-Saharan countries in the wake of civil war, it also solidified her resolve to build a career in public health.
“Seeing the suffering and the struggle that was going on was kind of like my wake-up call,” she says. “Something needs to be done. I need to start pulling my weight.”
Ifrah Ahmed MPH ’23 studied how health workers might reduce the disease burden of rheumatic heart disease at the University Teaching Hospital of Kigali (CHUK) during a trip to Rwanda with Geisel School of Medicine in 2023.
When Ahmed started studying public health at Geisel, she had long been toying with the idea of developing a nonprofit organization to address the maternal and child healthcare challenges she’d witnessed in her childhood. That was in the back of her mind when she began getting to know her classmates, some of whom became advisors and supporters as she scaffolded her plan to build such a nonprofit.
“The people that I met in the program, oh my god, they have been my rock,” Ahmed says. “It’s so many people who are doing different aspects [of public health]. We’re fighting different battles for the same goal. The advice, the encouragement that I got, I don’t think I would’ve gotten that had I not been in the program.”
Now, while she’s working on putting the final touches on her plan to launch her nonprofit, the International Maternal Care Initiative, Ahmed is continuing to lean on her classmates from the Geisel MPH program, and several are on the board of the organization.
Through the nonprofit, Ahmed aims to reduce mortality rates, improve health outcomes, and empower mothers and children in underserved communities by providing education about healthy behaviors, direct healthcare support and services, and advocacy for further support. The organization will initially focus on communities Ahmed is already connected to, like those in Minnesota, with an eye toward expanding globally.
In the meantime, Ahmed continues to work for the State of Minnesota, now as a program manager tackling HIV/AIDS prevention and diabetes, as well as serving as a liaison for refugee communities in the state. In that role, she organizes outreach events, and goes into rural communities to provide health education and connect people with services they need—just as she did many years ago in a Somalian refugee camp.