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Josh Ruxin, PhD, MPH '94
Director of the Millennium Villages Project in Rwanda and Director of the Access Project for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria
"When young people are first exposed to abject poverty and the public health ills that accompany it, their first reaction is a passionate desire to be helpful as quickly as possible," says Josh Ruxin, assistant clinical professor of Population and Family Health. "But good intentions alone don't make good public health," notes Dr. Ruxin.
To put his own good intentions to the test, Dr. Ruxin embarked on a journey that brought him from a trip to Ethiopia in high school, to Yale for a bachelor's degree in the history of science and medicine, and, after a year-long Fulbright Scholarship to work on women's and childrenšs public health issues in Bolivia, to earning an MPH from the Mailman School and a PhD at the University of London where he was a Marshall scholar.
Following school, Dr. Ruxin amassed unique private sector experience with the Monitor Group and later with ontheFRONTIER Inc., a strategy consulting firm that Dr. Ruxin co-founded. During his five years as a consultant, he led projects in a dozen developing countries and was an advisor to government and private sector leaders on business strategy and economic development.
When Rwanda became ontheFRONTIER's leading client, Dr. Ruxin visited Africa and directly observed how the AIDS crisis had seeped into every aspect of life there. It was then that he founded the Access Project, to combine private sector expertise with public health challenges, and he began working with Jeffrey Sachs, director of Columbia University's Earth Institute, where the Millennium Villages project is based.
The Millennium Villages Project, which has villages clustered into 12 groups across ten African countries, offers an innovative model for helping rural African communities lift themselves out of extreme poverty. Through a model of community-led development, the goal is to help rural Africa achieve the Millennium Development Goals by 2015 and escape from the poverty trap. The Access Project for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria helps countries fight these diseases by dramatically increasing the availability of funding for practical health initiatives, and providing management support to strengthen public health systems.
Both the Millennium Village and Access Project's ongoing work continue to bring benefits to Rwandans. In 2007, the Access Project helped upgrade three dozen health centers in Rwanda serving one million people. As a result, the Project was recognized with the RESULTS annual Visionary in Action Award for achievements in fighting AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and poverty in Rwanda.
Recently, Dr. Ruxin's work has drawn the interest of major media outlets and he is a regular contributor to New York Times' columnist Nicholas Kristof's popular "On The Ground" blog. In this role, Dr. Ruxin has contributed to an ongoing public discussion on the importance of investment in infrastructure and human resources, as well as the vital role of development dollars in creating a new prosperity necessary to successfully fight disease and eradicate poverty.
According to Dr. Ruxin, "The days when public health could be tackled in a vacuum are numbered. An integrated approach to public health requires knowledge and skills for tackling poverty and creating prosperity. Helping a cooperative sell products at market is as important to health as providing inexpensive treatments for intestinal worms. Ensuring a transparent and robust political environment is as essential as ensuring high quality health center management. Only newly synthesize, comprehensive approaches will ultimately deliver the results that the poor of the world desperately require."
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