In October 2005, Rabia Mir was a 20-year-old junior at Harvard University when the academic year took an unexpected turn. The Pakistan earthquake struck in her home country killing nearly 80,000 people.
The scale and extent of the disaster struck close to home. Rabia, raised in Karachi, immediately took to spearheading fundraising efforts at Harvard to provide shelter to homeless survivors. She then headed to Pakistan to coordinate the disbursement of donations with a well-known national non-profit organization.
Rabia explains that this is where she first became acquainted with Merlin’s work. “They were working in areas where there weren’t many other aid organizations,” she says. She notes there were many remote mountain outposts, heavily damaged by the quake, yet neglected by the government and the media. “It was chaos, and Merlin had their act together,” she adds.
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The experience stayed with her and played a pivotal role in determining where Rabia is today: working with Merlin’s Health and Policy team at London headquarters. After graduating from Harvard and joining a global rotational program at Capital Group Companies, Rabia started a series of rotations, exploring marketing, investment and research. The program also includes a non-profit rotation, so Rabia chose Merlin for a four-month internship.
Working with the Health and Policy team, Rabia brings her private-sector experience and research skills to important global health development issues. Among Merlin’s top policy priorities is the global health worker shortage and Rabia’s role is researching and developing a study to examine factors that affect health worker retention in fragile states.
In the global shortage of skilled health workers, providing adequate remuneration, financial incentives and professional motivation is key to retaining health staff and thereby achieving Millennium Development Goals.
In many developing nations and fragile states, the lack of government investment in health and infrastructure, has forced trained health staff and medical professionals to desert the rural and remote areas where they are needed and seek jobs in cities or abroad. Central African Republic provides a troubling example: In a nation of 4.2 million people, there are just 43 midwives—40 of them live in the capital Bangui.
Rabia points out, “You cannot retain a trained birth attendant in a rural area if they aren’t properly compensated, so we want to understand what they need in terms of a package—the financial and non-financial incentives.”
Over the last, three months that Rabia has been developing the study, other key actors in the sector have expressed interest and there is potential to expand the field research aspect of the study,. “I really do hope that this study helps to highlight the reasons for the chronic retention issues that exist in fragile states and some tangible steps to address them.”
Find out more about our work in Pakistan