Patricia Porekuu. Photo by Megan Jones

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MPH Student Aims to Bring Women’s Financial Autonomy to the Fore

As the winner of Innovate@BU’s 2025 Enlight Fellowship, Patricia Porekuu will receive a $10,000 stipend to intern at the Boston Impact Initiative this summer while developing her social venture to promote financial empowerment for rural women in her home country of Ghana.

Patricia Porekuu’s first job after her undergraduate studies brought her to the remote farming villages on the outskirts of Ghana’s Mole National Park, in her home region of northern Ghana. There, working with a team of advisors, community members, and local government institutions, she helped develop tourism with the Netherlands Development Organisation (SNV).

Since then, Porekuu has spent more than 15 years working with a variety of non-governmental organizations across Ghana on a range of projects from water, sanitation and hygiene management to sexual and reproductive health promotion. Throughout her career, she has frequently served people on society’s fringes, including Ghana’s LGBTQ+ population, people living with HIV, and sex workers. Having fashioned herself into a committed advocate for equitable access to healthcare and socioeconomic autonomy, she came to the School of Public Health in the spring 2025 to earn her MPH. There is no better time to study public health than the present, she says. “Health is a fundamental human right.”

Even as her career has taken her to another continent, Porekuu has never forgotten the rural women engaged in shea butter production, honey-making, and other agricultural trades for their livelihood whom she met in those remote villages during her first foray into development work. As SPH’s first recipient of the Innovate@BU Enlight Fellowship, Porekuu will join a cohort of 10 aspiring change-makers from across the university who will each receive a $10,000 stipend to hone their entrepreneurial skills. The fellows will intern with nonprofit partners while advancing their visions for their own social ventures. Porekuu recently learned she has been matched with the Boston Impact Initiative (BII), a local nonprofit dedicated to building financial, social, and political power among entrepreneurs of color. She aims to apply what she learns at BII to launch her own NGO dedicated to the financial empowerment of rural women in Ghana.

She spoke with SPH about her development work in Ghana, experience at BU, and aspirations for her Enlight Fellowship.

What did you study in Ghana that led you to become involved development work?

I studied agricultural technology majoring and natural resource management and that’s what I used in building the community-based tourism interventions I worked on at SNV. Then, I did a Master of Philosophy [degree] in development studies that gave me the leverage to be able to work broadly in the development sector, especially on issues of policies, health, water, sanitation, and stakeholder engagement of rural women. [Until now,] I have not had the opportunity to formally study public health but I began learning on the job.

If you could solve one public health problem that you’ve observed in Ghana, what would that be and why?

It is difficult because public health issues in Ghana are intertwined. One fundamental thing I would like to work on is to empower women, because a lot of things center around women. When you look at HIV, for instance, women are the most vulnerable. They are most vulnerable because we have a lot of young people engaged in transactional sex [or] sometimes women have partners who then have multiple partners. They bring the disease back to the women and they don’t even know what to do with it. Then, at the end of the day, they give birth to children who are HIV positive. But once a woman is empowered to understand the health implications, then she will be in a better position to ask, “Can we use a condom?” And once they’re also economically empowered, it will reduce their reliance on the financial support of men, including exchanging sex for money, and ultimately reducing rates of intimate partner violence and gender-based violence.

We need to look at how issues can be integrated so that when we are addressing public health, we address it in an integrated model and not necessarily tackle it piece by piece or just when the problems arise. I remember during COVID it was difficult to even differentiate between COVID and TB, because they have similar symptoms—coughing and all of that. But that gave us an opportunity to address COVID and TB at the same time. When you’re going to public places, for example, you can wear a mask. You can make sure you wash your hands with soap. Once all those things are done, it prevents other the infectious diseases like diarrheal diseases too. That integrated approach will go a long way to address most of our public health issues in Ghana.

What has been your impression of BU so far?

When I first came, initially I thought, “Oh Lord, did I make a mistake?” Because I was struggling in class. Having worked for so many years, to be back in the classroom in a different country, I thought, “Oh no, I’m not sure I can survive.” I had to restructure myself and my plans to be able to meet deadlines and all that. I also spoke to my professors who were very, very helpful. The group assignments with other students also helped because it gave me an opportunity to engage more. Now, I can say I’m good to go!

The first day I went to the Charles River Campus, I was like, “Oh my God! All of that is BU?” I was shocked because everything for the MPH happens on the BU Medical Campus. [BU] is a very big university. Back in my country, we don’t have anything like [Innovate@BU], so if you want to invent things you didn’t have that kind of platform to be able to develop your ideas. It was all about going to school, reading, getting good grades, and then we are gone. But with Innovate@BU, you are not limited by what you are doing in the classroom. When I attended the Innovators Night, it was so interesting to see the things that students go the extra mile to do because of what they feel within, their passion!

How do you plan to leverage your Enlight Fellowship?

This fellowship is an opportunity for me to build my entrepreneurial mindset.  During the two-month fellowship, my vision is to create and lead a sustainable social venture to empower rural women in Ghana. I look forward to acquiring a better understanding of some existing concepts, such as village savings-and-loan schemes, and exploring how I can innovate something for Ghana. I will be working with Boston Impact Initiative three days a week and then two days per week, I’ll meet with Innovate@BU and the other fellows to interact with mentors to help us shape our ideas.

What I wish to do in the long run is to be able to establish a non-governmental organization focusing on supporting women. From my years of experience, women are the most disadvantaged, especially from where I come from. Disadvantaged in the sense that they don’t get opportunities in terms of education, especially in the rural areas. Men have the power. It’s men who own land [and] women work on those farms. At the end of the day, it’s a man’s decision when it comes to finances. And sometimes, because women over-rely on their partners that can lead to gender-based violence. So, I see an opportunity to leverage my experience working with women, my experience in service delivery to build a social venture, to look at entrepreneurial opportunities and see how I can leverage those skills to empower women to do things for themselves, generate their own funding, become economically stable, and then that will give them financial liberation. I would also like to use that platform to be able to continue educating women on issues around their health because there are so many things about our health that we struggle to understand, especially young girls. So, I would use that platform to be able to also provide public health awareness.