Sarah Anne Lewis

Sarah is originally from Waterbury, VT and she just returned from a volunteer trip to Nicaragua with Grounds for Health, a Vermont-based organization that conducts sustainable cervical cancer screening and treatment for women in Tanzania, Nicaragua and Mexico. Sarah has worked in Boston for the past 3 years in international public health policy with the WHO and Harvard Medical School on projects to improve access to and use of essential medicines. Sarah would apply her knowledge from a Global M.B.A towards improving the standards of living for people within these populations, particularly for women.

Sarah's Essay:

Speaking to a predominantly male audience in Saudi Arabia when asked whether Saudi Arabia could become a top ten technologically advanced country by 2010, Bill Gates answered, “…if you’re not fully utilizing half the talent in the country, you’re not going to get too close to the top ten.”1

I believe in the empowerment of women, and in earning a Global MBA at Southern New Hampshire
University, I can develop the business skills that will lead to this end. After having worked for two years in the field of global health I have experienced the positive, lasting effect empowered women can have within their vulnerable population – whether it be in improving methods of health delivery or educating their families and communities. As inherent nurturers and natural family leaders, women have a unique opportunity – when empowered themselves – to pass on and employ that sense of self-sustainability and motivation to others in their communities.

Over ten years ago at the 1994 Cairo International Conference on Population and Development,
philanthropists demonstrated that a strong link exists between improving the status of women and
population issues. More recently, the world has seen in countries such as Afghanistan and Pakistan that an improvement in the status of women is possible and that in doing so, positive societal and
governmental changes can occur. When humanitarian and peace activist Greg Mortenson helped small villages in Pakistan, he promoted education and literacy predominantly for the girls in these deprived and developing villages where girls’ education never existed before.

During my time in China while working with Harvard Medical School and the WHO Collaborating
Center, I witnessed the full effect of women’s empowerment. I was a part of a team that developed and taught a two week course on pharmaceutical policy analysis to health care professionals and policy makers from Beijing. The majority of these participants were women, hand-selected to attend the course to help improve China’s health system. During the course, women’s opinions mattered, and they contributed equally – if not more so – to the budding health care debate. This inspired me. If women in Communist China could lead a movement in health reform, imagine the possibilities of women’s empowerment in other developed countries.

How do we ensure that changes like this continue in developing countries? We can inspire change by teaching and providing business tools such as managerial, financial and entrepreneurial skills to women who will make a difference in their communities. Community entrepreneurs can improve social needs such as infrastructure, education and overall community health simply by improving their own status through individual enterprise.

Earning a Global MBA at Southern New Hampshire University will enable me to transfer the knowledge and skills I develop in social entrepreneurship, strategic management, accounting, quantitative analysis, and effective leadership of non-profit organizations directly to other women seeking to be catalysts for change in their own communities.

1 Kristof, Nicholas and Sheryl WuDunn. “The Women’s Crusade.” The New York Times. August 23, 2009.