Fortunate Chifamba is a first-generation Master of Public Health graduate hailing from Zimbabwe. She lives in Alaska and works as an Infection Preventionist at Providence Alaska Medical Center. While pursuing her MPH in Global Health and Population, she completed a concentration in Maternal and Child Health through the school’s Maternal and Child Health Center of Excellence. She has been working with the Children’s Foundation of Mississippi as one of two Mississippi Delta Fellows providing strategic and technical support to inform the development of a Blueprint on behalf of Mississippi’s children. As an Intern in the Health, Nutrition and Population Global Practice division of the World Bank Group, she provided analytical and operational support in developing country level global analytical products to guide Health Financing and Strategic Purchasing of healthcare services in middle-income countries. In 2020, she was selected as a Harvard Ministerial Leadership Fellow where she worked in collaboration with the Zambian Ministry of Health on a project to address the root causes of maternal mortality in Zambia. She has worked as a Graduate Research Fellow with Dr. Jonathan Lipton at Boston Children’s Hospital where the lab’s research seeks to understand the fundamental relationships between the circadian clock and diseases of the developing brain. She received a B.A in Biochemistry from Smith College in 2016. Fortunate Chifamba is passionate about enhancing global human health through effective analysis, interpretation and dissemination of accurate health information. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, she has collaborated with students from the USAP Community School in Zimbabwe on a project to help dispel misinformation about COVID-19, providing real time data and verified health information to the Zimbabwe audience via WhatsApp.
Ms. Chifamba is a recipient of the 2021 Gareth M. Green Award for Public Health Practice.
Detailed Project Description: The Children’s Foundation of Mississippi (CFM) is a new, independent operating foundation focused upon improving the policies and systems that affect the well-being of children in Mississippi. The CFM is serving as a convener, facilitator, advocate and catalyst for positive change in the state. The goal of this project was to help the CFM develop a blueprint to advance children’s health and well-being throughout the state, to be used as a strategic guide for the CFM’s activities. This blueprint would not only articulate the top challenges faced by children in the state for an audience of state agencies, nonprofits, and private sector partners, but also the priority areas where the CFM could maximize their impact on children’s health, education, and well-being outcomes (e.g. the most feasible interventions where the Foundation had expertise). This statewide, multisectoral plan would fill a major gap in the state: Mississippi has no overarching strategic plan to align actors in addressing the challenges that children face. Finally, the project was intended to draw primarily from Mississippians’ expertise and lived experience. Following the analysis of Mississippians’ concerns and recommendations, we then researched best practices from other geographies to adapt for Mississippi.