alumni

‘I See Them All in My Mind’s Eye’

Muka Chikuba-McLeod (SPH’98), a Zambian physician and co-recipient of SPH’s 2023 Distinguished Alumni Award, shares stories of the people she helped after trading clinical care for the opportunity to amplify her impact through public health.

Muka Chikuba-McLeod (SPH’98) will never forget the patient encounter that forever changed the trajectory of her life.

Chikuba-McLeod grew up in a rural region of Zambia. She remembers walking barefoot to her village school each day before moving to the city as a teenager to attend high school. Her father, a teacher, deeply valued education and significantly expanded her opportunities with his support of her studies. She went on to attend medical school, determined to become a surgeon. That is until her clinical rotation in pediatrics, when she met four-year-old Liseli.

Liseli (Lee-say-lee) was admitted to the hospital for severe malnutrition. In Lozi, a language spoken in southwestern Zambia, Liseli means light. Chikuba-McLeod recalls repeatedly trying and failing to bring a smile to the child’s gaunt face, “She had a way of looking at you with her sad, sunken eyes which forced you to really see her and her suffering and ask yourself if you were doing everything you could to abate that suffering.”

Despite their best efforts, Chikuba-McLeod and her colleagues were unable to save Liseli and she died five days later. As a young doctor, losing Liseli was painful and humbling, Chikuba-McLeod says, but the knowledge that the child’s death was preventable haunted her. If Liseli’s teenage mother had the resources and know-how to provide proper nutrition or the insight to seek care earlier, Chikuba-McLeod believes Liseli would have lived.

Liseli was not the first nor the last loss Chikuba-McLeod experienced during her early career as a doctor. The HIV epidemic ravaged Zambia in the 1990s and early 2000s. With antiretrovirals (ARVs) yet to become available, hospitals filled up and nearly everyone whose disease progressed to AIDS died.

“[Liseli] got me thinking about other preventable deaths and how I could contribute to abating them,” says Chikuba-McLeod. Over the next seven years, as she worked on the frontlines of the HIV crisis, channeling all her energy into doing whatever she could to comfort her patients, she began to wonder if her contributions might be better served upstream, “[preventing] people from falling into the river, rather than fishing them out down the river.” With this vision in mind, in 1997 she enrolled at SPH to study international health.

In medicine, doctors do their best to help the patient in front of them, says Chikuba-McLeod, while in public health, practitioners try to have a broader impact. SPH’s Master of Public Health (MPH) program equipped her with the skills to meaningfully build upon her clinical foundation, she says. “I think coming to BU helped me to get more organized and analytical so that I could deliver my best at a much larger scale.”

Over the course of her now more than two decades in public health consulting at John Snow, Inc., Chikuba-McLeod has led five major global health initiatives with combined value of over $482 million. In recognition of her accomplishments, SPH has honored Chikuba-McLeod with a Distinguished Alumni Award to be presented at the American Public Health Association Annual Meeting in Atlanta, Georgia next month. Fellow alum and JSI leader Kate Onyejekwe (SPH’03) is also a recipient of the 2023 award.

Chikuba-McLeod credits her successful second career in part to her education at SPH and in part to her initiative to always keep clients and patients at the center of her work.

“Whether it is improving access to quality healthcare for the woman in a fishing camp who needs her family planning injection or ensuring that the eight-year-old boy in a rural village gets his ARVs and continues to thrive in school or ensuring that the adolescent girl in a new mining town that puts her at risk of HIV gets her pre-exposure prophylaxis tablets, I see them all in my mind’s eye,” says Chikuba-McLeod, who, in her most recent roles at JSI, was responsible for providing HIV treatment to over 300,000 Zambians in three provinces. “Delivering my best every day for them through well-organized, person-centered public health interventions is what drives me.”

As chief of party for the $153-million USAID SAFE (Supporting an AIDS Free Era) Program and JSI country representative for Zambia, Chikuba-McLeod worked with a team of technical experts to ensure that SAFE’s hundreds of program staff were properly trained and equipped to care for patients, that laboratory systems spread across three provinces ran efficiently, and that real-time monitoring data was appropriately collected, analyzed, and applied to improving service delivery.

When Chikuba-McLeod first returned to Zambia from the US in 2007, JSI had about 240 local staff members. The country’s portfolio has since grown to become one of organization’s largest with approximately 1,200 staff and an additional 3,000 community-based volunteers across multiple programs. A major component of Chikuba-McLeod’s work today focuses on nurturing an environment where her team can thrive, she says.

Like her father, Chikuba-McLeod is a huge proponent of education, and she has mentored many young people throughout her career. Some have gone on to become chiefs of party and project directors in countries across in Africa. She encourages young people everywhere interested in public health to go for it.

“There is nothing more rewarding than seeing the fruits of your work through the improved lives and livelihoods of other people, and sometimes in public health you get to experience that first-hand,” she says.