When USAID was dismantled over a year ago, many international development organizations found themselves adrift. This rupture exposed a fragile system that had driven organizations to become dependent on donor priorities. The destruction of USAID led to devastation for hundreds of thousands around the world who relied on USAID-funded services. But this rupture also created an opportunity: a chance to realign with the values that should be driving international development, values that I found still intact when I returned to Integrate Health (IH) after 20 years.
I am currently the Senior Director of Partnership at IH, but my journey began over 20 years ago as an HIV and Community Health volunteer in northern Togo. I worked alongside Integrate Health’s co-founders, an experience that shaped me, not through what I delivered, but through what I learned. The values instilled in me during those formative years—equity, collaboration, and empowerment—became the compass by which I would navigate my career in global health.
Following my time in the Peace Corps, I began my career working for Population Services International, then IntraHealth International, managing multi-million-dollar, donor-funded health projects in West Africa. In 2024, I became a Senior Advisor for West Africa at USAID, supporting country mission strategy and locally led development initiatives.
Over this time, I increasingly saw the limitations of this system. Objectives and outcomes were often defined in Washington, DC, rather than in the communities they aimed to serve. Projects typically followed five-year cycles that were not conducive to the long-term needs of health systems. The process to access funding was competitive, complex, and intimidating, often accessible only to large organizations with robust business development teams. The short turnaround time for proposal submission was often not conducive to meaningful co-creation and collaboration with local partners.
Even as I worked within this system, I stayed connected to IH because it aligned with my values and demonstrated those values in action. I continued to support IH by serving on the Board of Directors and leading grassroots fundraising in DC, showing how even modest donations can fuel meaningful change.
Then, in early 2025, came the sudden dismantling of USAID and the unraveling of the global health sector. I was one of the first to lose my job overnight, along with 400 other USAID colleagues. I thought that I would need to change sectors or roles to continue to do mission-driven work. I threw my whole self into finding my next role, not expecting to end up where I had begun my journey. When I had the opportunity to come back to IH as the Senior Director of Partnership, I was ecstatic—while it was a new role, it represented a homecoming to an organization whose culture and ethos I had helped to build. I was curious to see how IH had evolved over time. What I found was a much larger, more complex organization, but one that was still firmly rooted in its original values.
IH’s commitment to these values is an act of resistance in today’s world. Specifically, three of its core values—equity, collaboration and empowerment—stand out to me as having enabled IH to survive a sector-wide collapse intact. The way these values are put into action represents a new playbook that should replace the old development model.
For Integrate Health:
- Equity means not relying on USG bilateral funding, so we could continue our work. It also means continuing to focus on Francophone West Africa because it has some of the highest maternal and child mortality rates in the world, yet receives 5-15% less foreign assistance funding than East and Southern Africa. These realities mean that IH had to intentionally build a network of values-aligned funders who were supportive of our strategy and interested in investing in West Africa from the start. In essence, this has created a reinforcing cycle whereby our values behind our strategy attract like-minded funders, which enables us to continue to drive our strategy and improve health impact.
- Collaboration means trust-based, multi-year, unrestricted funding that enables us to implement our strategic plan in partnership with governments, rather than relying on restricted, short-term project cycles. By securing long-term partnerships, we gain the space to cultivate vision and strategic thinking, rather than just meeting reporting deadlines. This funding for programs is mission-led, not donor-driven, allowing us to rebalance power, test innovations, and truly meet the needs of our government partners. We are relational, not transactional. As a founding member of the Community Health Impact Coalition (CHIC), we work alongside peers to cultivate an abundance mentality, proving that we can work together to increase overall investments in community health systems, rather than compete for a shrinking piece of the pie.
- Empowerment means ensuring that West African leadership drives regional and national resource mobilization so our funding base isn’t dependent on external funding. Our Executive Team is majority West African and comprised mostly of women, who personally understand what is at stake. Our strategic focus on regional, national, and local engagement will enable us to leverage existing networks to access new partnerships, unlock investments, and cultivate local funding opportunities. Recently, our staff participated in a West African Philanthropy Forum in Lomé, Togo, connecting with African funders, entrepreneurs, and civil society leaders who want to be architects of long-term solutions. African philanthropy is rising, and IH aims to co-create along with it.
Returning to IH last year brought me back to the values that first inspired this work. During a recent visit to Djamde, Togo, in my role as Senior Director of Partnerships, I saw the real impact of that commitment: a health system strengthened by the resilience of the community itself. My journey has taught me that the future of global health depends on shifting power, building trusted relationships, and centering the needs of the people we serve. IH embodies what becomes possible when equity, collaboration, and empowerment are not aspirations, but practice. In a world that too often ignores the people we aim to serve, remaining true to those values is Integrate Health’s act of resistance—and one I am honored to be part of.