Galeela Michael graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara, with a degree in Global Studies. As an undergraduate, Galeela worked as both a Campaign Lead at the Multicultural Center and as a Student Outreach Coordinator at the Office of Development, where she raised thousands of dollars for student initiatives. She was the President of UC Santa Barbara’s Pan-African Student Union, which served to amplify the voice of African students on campus. Galeela also spent a summer in Washington D.C., where she interned at The Congressional Black Caucus Foundation and conducted a research study analyzing the success of the Millennium Development Goals in Kenya, Ethiopia, and Nigeria. After graduating, Galeela returned to the San Francisco Bay Area, where she served as Programs & Operations Manager at a non-profit called /dev/color, which strives to maximize the impact of Black software engineers. Galeela was the third full-time hire at /dev/color, and made substantial contributions to the organization’s foundation, leading efforts to expand /dev/color to four cities nationally. Her experience at /dev/color jumpstarted her career at the intersection between tech and social impact, and today Galeela is most passionate about leveraging technology to improve peoples lives.

Alumni Update:

Since his fellowship year, Brent has relocated to Honolulu and is now a Certified Eye Bank Technician. He serves as Director of Operations at the Lions Eye Bank of Hawai’i, an eye tissue recovery and distribution nonprofit dedicated to meeting the transplantation needs of the Hawaiian Islands. His organization works to keep sight-saving eye tissue accessible to the communities that donate it, and he is proud to honor the wishes of eye donors and their families while strengthening the independent medical infrastructure of the Islands.

Fellow Bio:

While pursuing a double major at the intersection of Biomedical Engineering and African Studies at Yale, one of the things Brent enjoyed most was working with his campus chapter of Engineers Without Borders to design and implement infrastructural innovations that reduced water poverty in rural communities in Cameroon and Tanzania. Brent feels lucky to have seen up close the powerful effects that a community-level, locally directed development plan can have on improving health outcomes on the African continent, and so he is grateful for the chance to continue enabling that kind of work with Princeton in Africa, as a Sustainability Fellow at Nyumbani Village in Kenya. In the future, he hopes to use his skills as an engineer, combined with the firsthand knowledge of real-world needs and challenges gained during his fellowship year, to develop more affordable biotechnologies that can help to close resource and personnel gaps in medically underserved parts of the world.

Naomi grew up on Long Island, NY and graduated from Williams College, where she studied Economics and Public Health. She wrote her undergraduate honors thesis on the effects of cash transfer and empowerment programs on maternal and child well-being in Uganda, for which she was awarded Highest Honors and received the Jack Larned 1942 International Management Prize for a student paper of superior quality dealing with developmental enterprises. She also received the Van Duyne Prize in Economics to support her thesis work throughout her senior year. She spent eight weeks as an intern at IPA in Malawi, where she experienced the difficulties that arise when working in a developing country while also assisting with a project that focused on improving the incomes of small-holder farmers. She spent her junior fall in South Africa studying community health and social policy. After Williams, Naomi interned at HealthRight International, exploring how an international health organization manages both grant opportunities and projects in-country. Prior to her fellowship with Princeton in Africa at the Clinton Health Access Initiative, Naomi was a Research Associate at the Schroeder Center for Health Policy, based at William & Mary, where much of her work focused on domestic healthcare policy.

Megan has a lifelong passion for wildlife conservation and community service, stemming from her childhood which took her across eight states as well as Italy and Korea. Driven to find collaborative and innovative solutions to biodiversity and development challenges, she links science and advocacy to meaningful action. A graduate of the University of Virginia studying Environmental Science, Conservation Biology, and Global Sustainable Development, Megan has worked with the World Wildlife Fund and National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, supporting both terrestrial and marine programs. In collaboration with the Wildlife Conservation Society, she has helped develop the Marine Ecological Research and Monitoring Aid (“MERMAID”) app to accelerate coral reef data collection and analysis and has led workshops in Tanzania and Fiji to train local scientists to use the tool. She is also a certified Virginia Master Naturalist and is active in citizen science projects, community education, and leading volunteers in environmental projects and advocacy. Megan visited Kenya for the first time in 2017 and she is grateful to return to the country to work for Mpala Research Centre in the beautiful Laikipia County!

Sarah Mathys is a graduate of Georgetown University, where she majored in Anthropology and minored in Government and African Studies. Sarah has worked and studied across East Africa, and is interested in the intersections of spirituality, healing systems, and development work. She spent the spring of 2018 conducting independent qualitative research on the influence of religion on family planning decisions in eastern Uganda, and collected data which informed her honors thesis on the engagement between American FBOs and Ugandan communities. She has honed her project management and monitoring and evaluation skills through internships with The Carter Center, The Baker Trust for Transformational Learning, and now, a Monitoring & Evaluation fellowship with the Nyaka AIDS Orphans Project. In her spare time, she enjoys live music, contemporary art, and trying out new recipes.

Lucy, a native of Hunan, China, graduated summa cum laude from Bowdoin College with High Honors in Political Philosophy, a second major in Mathematics, and a minor in Computer Science. Lucy became passionate about international development, and particularly about funding issues and private-public partnerships, through her volunteer experience teaching English in Longshan Village in China, as well as her professional experiences in making resource allocation decisions in both public and private sectors. As an undergraduate, she interned as an analyst for Bowdoin College’s $1 billion endowment, and was the student representative on Bowdoin Trustee’s Financial Planning Committee. She was a part of Bowdoin’s Common Good Grant Program, in which competitively selected committee members raised funds and wrote grants to Maine non-profits after evaluation and site visits. Following graduation, Lucy worked at Bank of America Merrill Lynch as a research analyst, where she learned about useful market tools in improving the economy and consumer welfare. She conducted and published research on central bank policies, the US housing market, homeowner behaviors, bank regulations, securitization, and made investments recommendations to institutional investors. In her free time, she helps to educate prisoners through writing, enjoys rock climbing, skiing, watching soccer, and is an avid pianist. As a fellow, Lucy believes in African Leadership Academy’s mission in educating young leaders for the future of African development, and looks forward to applying her prior experiences with funding and markets to help ALA become more financially sustainable.

Born in Tucson, Arizona and raised in Seoul, South Korea, Amy graduated from New York University with a degree in Global Public Health and Anthropology. Amy grew up frequently moving between the two countries and attending numerous public and private schools. Experiencing a clash of cultures and different education systems, Amy became interested in the intersection of culture, education, and health. During her time in New York, she interned at HealthRight International, a global health and human rights NGO, where she took part in developing a ‘Reproductive Health and Human Rights’ online course. She also volunteered to teach teenagers to make healthy choices in public high schools in low-income communities. She studied abroad in Ghana and wrote a case study report about Ghana’s mental health system during her internship at KEBA Africa, highlighting the impact of policy and culture on health and education of abandoned children living in Accra Psychiatric Hospital. She also volunteered at a community-based organization where she developed and implemented a reproductive and sexual health curriculum at schools in urban slum areas. She hopes to continue serving underserved and marginalized populations, and one day see Africa lead the highest standard of healthcare and education.

Alumni Update:

Ruba was the Outreach Coordinator for Princeton in Africa from February to September 2021. She is currently based in London, where she is attending The London School of Economics to get her master’s in international development and health.

Fellow Bio:

Ruba Idris is a recent graduate of the University of Pittsburgh, where she earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Health Services, Certificates in Health Services and African Studies and a Minor in Economics. She is interested in foreign affairs, health and development and intends to pursue a Master’s Degree in International Development, and later in the future, a Masters of Public Health. Ruba originally hails from Sudan and her cultural duality as a Sudanese-American has provided her with a deeper cultural understanding of countries in the global north and the global south. She plans to return to the African continent where she is interested in translating economic and entrepreneurial potential present within the young population into concrete skills while reducing the health issues that impact the population and its productivity. She aspires to work for various organizations focusing on development such as USAID, the World Bank and the United Nations. Ruba is passionate about working with people from different backgrounds, exploring various cultures, examining and understanding trends and links within developing nations, and understanding holistic paradigms of development. These interests are portrayed through her panoply of courses, which encompass language, economics, health and history, amongst other topics, and the various activities she has participated in such as study abroad, research and student organizations. During her 4 years in undergraduate school, Ruba worked to cultivate her leadership skills through different leadership roles in student organizations, which include her positions as president of the African Students Organization and the vice president of Model African Union. She has also expanded her cultural competency and deepened her understanding of development through her study and work abroad in Tanzania, Ghana, and Honduras, and through her research work with local African communities. Other than academia, Ruba is also very passionate about fashion and owns a T-shirt business that aims to spread knowledge about the continent of Africa. She hopes to one day incorporate Fashion into the economic development of the continent by cultivating a robust fashion industry. Ruba is a critical thinker and loves to learn and improve her personal skills. She enjoys being mentally challenged and strives to understand other points of views. She hopes to develop into a well-rounded individual who can mold to any sector within the development realm.

Julia is a graduate of UC Berkeley, where she studied Political Economy and Public Policy and cultivated an interest in using data to inform policy and improve livelihoods in the developing world. Her research experience at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health and the Blum Center for Developing Economies heightened her interest in examining the relationship between the global north and south and advocating for health access as a fundamental human right. Originally hailing from Long Beach, California, Julia spent the last two and a half years supporting the design and implementation of evaluations and randomized control trials at Social Impact, a Washington DC-based international development consulting firm. During her time at SI, Julia gained field experience supervising data collection in Nepal, supported a maternal and child health evaluation in Laos, analyzed data for a Ghana education portfolio, and implemented a nationwide labor force study in Kosovo. In her previous work, Julia interned at a Los Angeles-based nonprofit where she worked to improve economic outcomes for marginalized communities, and contributed to policy briefs and research projects in human rights and sustainable development at a Madrid-based think tank.  Julia is looking forward to honing her monitoring and evaluation skills and focusing her efforts at the local level in Lwala.

Elaina, a Maryland native graduated from Princeton University with a major in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and a certificate in Global Health and Health Policy. Her interest in science and research began in high school when she was a part of the Science National Honor Society. She continued exploring biology fields the summer after freshman year at the Food and Drug Administration helping to research better ways of blood and platelet transfusions. After her junior year, Elaina spent 6 weeks in South Africa carrying out her Senior thesis research on the effects of African Elephants on ecosystem health. After spending the summer in South Africa she knew she wanted to go back to the continent to attempt to carry out more research in the field of conservation biology. She is excited to gain more experience in the field and continue to explore national parks as well as the African continent.