Turning worthy causes into real jobs

Program launches new college graduates into global health careers.

Christine GormanMay 23, 2009 11:58Updated May 30, 2010 11:56

A medical officer prepares to vaccinate an infant at a health clinic run by the medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) at a camp for displaced Chadians. Global Health Corps is offering positions to young graduates from the U.S. and Africa who want to pursue careers in international health care. (Finbarr O'Reilly/Reuters)

NEW YORK — Global health is a popular cause on U.S. college campuses but after graduation jobs in the field can be hard to come by.

Some enterprising college students came up with a solution to that problem by working to start the Global Health Corps, which is providing recent graduates with health jobs around the world. It is being launched this summer as a pilot program by Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif.

The idea is to pair up 20 recent college graduates — 10 from the U.S. and 10 from various African nations — to work for a year with established non-profit programs in five target countries: Rwanda, Burundi, Malawi, Tanzania and the U.S. The new organization has raised $650,000 in grants with the Google Foundation as the biggest donor.

“A big part of our mission is to inspire people to stay in global health for the long run,” said Dave Ryan, executive director of Global Health Corps and a 2007 graduate of Stanford. “We’re trying to broaden the face of people who go into global health. We’re trying to create career paths.”

The idea was the brainchild of three college students who attended a conference last year with former UNAIDS director Peter Piot on the Google campus in Mountain View, Calif. The group has since received more than 1,000 applications for its 20 fellowships. One particularly appealing feature: Some of the teams will be working in poor sections of Newark, N.J., and Boston, Mass.

“We’re putting the ‘global’ into ‘global health,’” Ryan said. “We thought it would be an important and powerful thing to start with some partners in the U.S. as well if we want to be truly global.”

But don’t get the idea that these newly minted graduates will be doing one-off, stand alone projects, which have become something of a scourge in global health and development circles. They will be working in ongoing projects with organizations, like Partners in Health, that have a reputation for seeing beyond the five-year grant cycle of many programs.

Nor are the ranks of the GHC fellows necessarily going to be filled with aspiring nurses or doctors. Many are likely to have backgrounds in computer programming, management or engineering in order to help develop such things as electronic health records, leadership development programs and more energy-efficient buildings.