Murishi Onesphore

From Refugee to Public Health Physician

One of Murishi Onesphore’s earliest memories is attending a makeshift school deep in the woods of a refugee camp in Zambia. He arrived there at the age of 10 in 1996, fleeing the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s civil war. At the school in the woods, a stranger taught him and other children how to count with bits of stone and how to write with their fingers in the dirt. He took his teacher’s message to heart: Education will change your life.

When he was working as a physician in Lusaka, Zambia, Murishi Onesphore  noticed that most of the diseases that took patients’ lives were largely preventable, such as diarrheal illnesses, malaria, and tuberculosis. Although he enjoyed caring for individual patients, Onesphore realized that large-scale public health interventions could save  far more lives.

“I look forward to going back to the refugee camps where I grew up to help those still there live better lives.”

To that end, in 2014, he and a medical school colleague cofounded Health Literacy Zambia, which aims to teach people the importance of public health interventions such as vaccines, prenatal care, and sanitation. He also coordinated refugee camps’ COVID-19 response at the beginning of the pandemic. Once Onesphore began practicing as a doctor, he continued doing public health work, managing an HIV/AIDS clinic, serving as a malaria prevention and control coordinator, and volunteering as an anti-tobacco, hygiene, and sanitation advocate.

Now in the MPH/MBA program at the Bloomberg School and the Carey Business School, Onesphore hopes to use his dual degrees to fight infectious diseases across Africa by improving pharmaceutical supply chain management.

“I want my legacy to be that I used my public health knowledge to save millions of lives,” he said.