Faculty: Medicine
Program: Master of Public Health
Year: 2019
Country: Tanzania
Joshua holds a Bachelor of Science degree from Duke University where he pursued a double major in Biology and Music with a Performance Concertation, and a minor in Chemistry. His mentors describe him as adventurous, eager to learn, innovative, and a passionate individual with many talents. He was a recipient of the Duke Karsh international scholarship, a merit-based full scholarship offered to the top students in the world. Joshua grew up in a rustic coastal village in Tanzania where he witnessed the lack of education in preventive care and poor access to health care services affecting the lower socio-economical class and non-government workers without health insurance. Joshua’s perspective of similar public health challenges in developing countries broadened when he joined the Karsh Mentorship Initiative (KMI) at Duke University. With KMI, he volunteered and co-led multiple summer camps for secondary students in Nepal, teaching waste management, child labor and designing interdisciplinary curriculum for students for other social impact projects. Through his volunteering and shadowing experiences in the medical centers at home, Joshua’s passion is refined to reform the health insurance system to accommodate patients from different financial backgrounds and to tackle socio-cultural factors hindering the health care education in Tanzania.
Joshua is thrilled to meet the diverse community at UBC and to commence his Masters of Public Health (MPH). Joshua strongly believes that UBC’s MPH curriculum that extensively covers the Canadian health policy and offers hands-on practicum experience, will enable him to navigate through, and approach the Tanzania health Policy creatively, and in the process facilitate his dream to better the Tanzania health care system.