Excerpt taken from an article originally published in Forbes.
Some people can pinpoint the exact moment that inspired their career path. For Dr. Vanessa Kerry, the founder and CEO of Seed Global Health, it was a childhood trip to an impoverished Vietnam. Dr. Kerry was troubled by the inequities in resources and access to health care. After graduating summa cum laude from Yale University, cum laude from Harvard Medical School and earning a master’s in Health Policy, Planning, and Financing from the London Schools of Economics, Dr. Kerry began her career in global health. As Dr. Kerry completed her clinical work in Uganda and Rwanda she noticed that doctors would provide short-term medical care without contributing to a long-term solution — equipping local doctors with the education necessary to care for the population.
In 2012, Dr. Kerry created the solution she had envisioned. “Seed Global Health helps train a pipeline of future doctors and nurses in partner countries with the idea that they become the future of health leadership,” says Dr. Kerry, “These individuals can not only provide care for the population, but they can be advocates and leaders for change in their country, and they can train their successors and their colleagues.” Dr. Kerry helped to establish the Global Health Service Partnership, a public-private collaboration between Seed Global Health, the Peace Corps and the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief in 2012. “Seed has sent over 155 faculty volunteers who live for a minimum of a year in the country where they work. We work at 34 sites in five countries now, and we’ve trained over 10,000 doctors, nurses and midwives over the last four years,” explains Dr. Kerry.