Creating Productive Collaborations
As the daughter of an American father and Kenyan mother, Zoe Mungai-Barris grew up in the U.S. experiencing tension from her origins in two countries with very different resources.
Drawn to travel and eager to be with family in Kenya, Mungai-Barris took a gap year after high school to teach English in rural Paraguay and Kenya.
“From a young age, I was always aware of belonging to two different worlds.”
The trip sparked her interest in international development. In college at the University of Florida, she gained knowledge and experience in this field through her double major in Economics and International Studies and triple minor in Spanish, Sociology, and African Studies.
After graduation in 2020, Mungai-Barris landed her first public health job at a small company called Changeable that supports social and behavior change work for USAID-funded projects. She contributed to the Reaching Impact, Saturation, and Epidemic Control (RISE) initiative—a USAID investment to support the COVID-19 response across Africa. As part of this project, Mungai-Barris worked with a team of providers in Kumasi, Ghana, to create a suite of empathy-based counseling tools to support community health workers in improving COVID-19 vaccination rates among hesitaters: an intervention she considers a pivotal professional milestone.
However, Mungai-Barris’ public health career thus far has largely focused on program design—to contribute to implementation and evaluation, she needs more education. At the Bloomberg School, she plans to focus on epidemiology, biostatistics, and social and behavioral sciences, with her future focus on the African continent.
“I want play a part in productive collaboration between end users and the organizations coming in, to encourage more participatory collaboration models instead of top down,” she says.
