Building Healthy Communities
By Rebecca Baggett

In spring 2007, Benjamin Chigozie Mbakwem spent three months on the Emory campus as the first Community Partners Leadership (CPL) Fellow at the Rollins School of Public Health (RSPH). Emory and Atlanta were a far cry from the 37-year-old’s native Imo State in southeastern Nigeria. However, Emory proved to be an ideal place to learn new skills and impart knowledge he has accumulated during his 15 years of experience in public health and development work in his home country.

Mbakwem is the founder and program director of Community & Youth Development Initiatives (CYDI), a non-governmental organization (NGO) focused on providing comprehensive HIV-prevention and support services to communities in Nigeria. The third child of an Oxford-and Cambridge-trained physician father and a successful business and community leader mother, Mbakwem has been interested in public health and development work since he was in secondary school, when he first saw international aid workers implementing outreach programs in his town and the surrounding areas of Imo State. His interest transformed into a professional goal during his final year at college while learning about diseases such as guinea worm, river blindness, bilharzia, and Loa Loa in an applied parasitology class.

“It was scary learning how these worms were wreaking so much havoc in people’s lives. Although my father was a medical doctor, I had never heard him talk about these diseases,” Mbakwem said. “I asked my lecturer what was being done about these problems, and he told me that some international development organizations were working in remote communities trying to address them. I realized that while we had access to health care facilities in the city, these communities were completely neglected.”

Since earning his bachelor’s degree in zoology in 1992 from the University of Port Harcourt in Rivers State, Nigeria, Mbakwem has dedicated himself to improving the health and living conditions of his fellow Nigerians. He spent a year in the epidemiological unit of the Ministry of Health in
Nigeria’s Kwara State under the National Youth Service Scheme, Nigeria’s compulsory community service program for university graduates. He then worked several years for Africare, a U.S.-based NGO dedicated to improving the quality of life of Africans by cooperating directly with local
African communities. While at Africare, Mbakwem focused his efforts on combating river blindness in Nigeria, which has the highest incidence of the debilitating disease in the world.

In 2001, Mbakwem received a prestigious Ashoka Fellowship, which recognizes and provides resources to entrepreneurs who develop innovative solutions to social problems. The fellowship allowed him to return to Imo State and found CYDI, where he has focused his efforts on stemming the HIV epidemic and the opportunistic infections that accompany it in his home region. Mbakwem is responsible for the overall management of CYDI and serves as secretary of its board of trustees. However, he is quick to recognize the contributions of his co-workers. “I could not do anything without the great team of people that I work with. I was so happy to see that, even during my three-month fellowship at Emory, the organization thrived and grew,” Mbakwem said.

Mbakwem’s Fellowship: A True Learning Partnership
Kate Winskell, a professor at RSPH, developed the CPL Fellows Program, which is funded by the Emory Global Health Institute. The program helps to build the capacity of small- and medium-sized NGOs by providing training to organizational leaders seeking to fill specific knowledge gaps.
She helps design the curriculum for individual fellows and serves as a mentor during their time at Emory. During the first phase of the CPL Fellows Program, community leaders associated with Scenarios from Africa (SfA), an HIV/AIDS prevention communications strategy that Winskell and her husband have co-managed since 1997, comprised the applicant pool.

Winskell first met Mbakwem in 2002 when he began working with SfA. Since 2005, Mbakwem has been the SfA national coordinator in Nigeria and has coordinated the submission of close to 2,000 stories written by young Nigerians to SfA competitions. “Benjamin is the epitome of a community leader – an example of modesty, humility, and selflessness. He dedicates his every working hour to increasing the capacity of local people and organizations in southeastern Nigeria to respond to the HIV epidemic,” said Winskell.

During his fellowship at Emory, Mbakwem took training courses in applied epidemiology, monitoring and evaluation, HIV counseling, and grant writing, and received personal tutoring in web site and database design and management. He also gave several talks to Emory students about his work in Nigeria. “It was with great joy that I met with these students during my spare time to consult with them about their individual research projects and help them develop feasible and effective health interventions in the communities they work in at home and abroad,” said Mbakwem.

It was this give-and-take that really made Mbakwem’s fellowship an enriching experience for both him and Emory. “We taught each other,” said RSPH Professor Stanley Foster, who worked with Mbakwem. “Benjamin’s sharing of his work showed how a value-driven, dedicated community organization could effectively use small amounts of money to make a difference in the community.”

Back Home
One of Mbakwem’s earliest inspirations in the fight against HIV/AIDS was Franco, a Makossa singer from the Congo who died of AIDS in 1989. “[Franco] wrote a song about what he felt the responsibility of artists, young people, the government, and the international community was in responding to and raising awareness about HIV/AIDS. Because of this, he is one of my heroes,” Mbakwem said.

After a cure for HIV/AIDS is found, Mbakwem says he would like to play drums in a Makossa band. Until then, he will keep leading CYDI’s efforts to make the lives of his countrymen better.

For more information, visit www.globalhealth.emory.edu

---

Rebecca Baggett is the communications and program manager of the Emory Global Health Institute.