There are places in Liberia where people go their whole lives without health services. 

Raj Panjabi, founder of Last Mile Health, is working to change that.

Last Mile Health recruits, trains, and supervises professionalized community health workers to take medical services to the villagers’ doorsteps – where it can have the mot impact. By 2017, Raj and his team will be delivering care to 130,000 Liberians who otherwise would not have access to health care. 

Raj grew up in Liberia and has dedicated his life to bettering his country. In September 2013, Raj was honored as a Global Citizen Movement Award Winner at the Global Citizen Festival. Raj’s favorite memory of the Festival was, “seeing my colleague Alice Johnson, our clinical mentor in the last mile district of Konobo, experience Stevie Wonder’s music for the very first time from the front row of the festival.” Alice travels over 100 miles on a motorbike every week to supervise our frontline health workers, and it was her very first time traveling to the US.

Raj explains that, “Last Mile Health was honored to receive the Global Citizen Award for Health in September 2013. The Global Citizen festival offered Last Mile Health an unprecedented opportunity to advocate for the last mile in front of 60,000 fans in Central Park and millions around the world. It was reinvigorating to see widespread support for the eradication of poverty, and to celebrate the progress we’ve made in reducing global poverty. However in order to eradicate poverty we need to get healthcare to the world’s most remote villages, where villagers can go their entire lives without seeing a health worker. Professionalized health workers who are trained and equipped to deliver health services door-to-door have the potential to dramatically change health outcomes. Closing this access gap in healthcare is a key step in eradicating poverty by 2030, and Last Mile Health is excited to work with partners like Global Citizen to make this vision a reality.”