Nonprofit helps bring healthcare to African continent

Since the age of 5, Michelle Lyden, BC '91, knew she wanted to work with children in Africa. If she were told at 5 years old that this desire would lead her to create her own nonprofit organization, subsequently placing her in the company of the president of the United States and leaving her to serve as counsel for government officials throughout Africa, she would have thought it was a lie. But after creating Global Action, Lyden has already worked within Rwanda and Tanzania to impact global health policies, even meeting former President Bill Clinton in 2006.

Lyden, who also did her graduate work at Boston College, graduating in '95, still remembers watching the commercials about the famine in Ethiopia and seeing children starving and dying on the side of roads on television. She remembers her father trying to explain to a 5-year-old the inequities of the world, something that she still struggles with. She remembers a desire to change what she saw. "It really struck me and it always has stayed with me," Lyden said.

Lyden took her first step toward her dream when she graduated from the Connell School of Nursing in 1991. After graduating, Lyden started working with children diagnosed with AIDS at the Children's Hospital of Boston. Working in pediatric AIDS during a time when the disease was still misunderstood, Lyden said she most enjoyed the psychosocial aspect of her work that included a look at the stigmatization and discrimination that came with the disease.

Then, in 2002, Lyden started working as a nurse practitioner for a family from South Africa. With her experience working in pediatric AIDS, she soon realized that the family's 15-month-old infant was positive for HIV. With this knowledge, she faced the difficult task of telling the parents, who refused to get tested themselves due to an ongoing fear of discrimination from both their village and their families. The 15-month-old baby, however, could die within the next two months without the proper medication, Lyden said.

"What I realized was that the situation they faced was what we faced in the '80s and '90s, and in 2002; they were so far behind in Africa and there was this great inequality in global health," she said.

The child eventually got tested but Lyden decided then that she wanted to learn more about what was happening.

Lyden said that this was before people were aware of the situation in Africa. "You have to understand that this was before Bono put it on the map. It was just starting to get notoriety, but it was still a global problem," she said.

In 2003, she attended the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and received her master's degree in international relations with a focus on global health. With these different degrees, Lyden then took her final steps toward completing her childhood ambition.

She started to directly work in Africa in the fields of AIDS, nutrition, and family planning after graduating from the Kennedy school in 2005.

Initially, she began as a consultant for nonprofit organizations and different governments within Africa. She worked in partnership with each country's minister of health to improve the quality of health for people in Africa.

In May of 2006, everything changed for Lyden as she created her own non-profit organization called Global Action. With Global Action came a wave of recognition for her personal cause. Soon after starting her nonprofit she was hired by the Clinton administration to train doctors and nurses in Rwanda.

She began to work within the Rwanda government and with children, but soon realized she was going to have to change gears if the government programs she helped create were to work. Up until that point, Lyden had only been focused on the problem of AIDS, but she said she soon learned that there were other underlying issues that affected the treatment of the disease.

"I noticed that the more pervasive problem was starvation. Most of the children who came in were already suffering from severe chronic malnutrition. I saw so many kids die, so I started to incorporate malnutrition along with AIDS," Lyden said.

Lyden is scheduled to go back to Africa in February. She will be working in two different locations in Rwanda, one with 15 children who suffer from malnutrition and the second with 1,000 children under the age of 10 who are HIV positive. She will also organize several community health projects in which they will be training community health workers in an attempt to attack the problem of malnutrition at the household level, reaching 33,000 children initially and potentially 50,000 by the end of the year.

With all her experience working directly with the government and as a nurse treating every kind of patients, Lyden said she is a more understanding person.

"I think I have a greater appreciation with working with the undeserving … being on the ground, I can step back because I know what it takes to get from point A to point B," Lyden said.

Looking back at her time at BC, Lyden appreciated the Jesuit tradition most - the lessons she received about leadership, humanity, and ethics still influence her work today.

"I am a cheerleader for poor people without a voice. It's what makes my work so exciting," Lyden said.