Agnes Binagwaho: Humour, hope, and global health

Biography

Agnes Binagwaho is a Rwandan paediatrician with a mission to transform healthcare in the country of her birth. Brought up and trained in Belgium after her parents left Rwanda when she was 3, she returned in 1996, just two years after civil war and the mass slaughter of the Tutsi people had left Rwanda devastated. Her life has since been dedicated to improving health quality and access—first in HIV and then at Rwanda’s Ministry of Health, where she served as permanent secretary and then as minister of health, from 2011 to 2016. She is now vice chancellor of the University of Global Health Equity in Kigali, which she cofounded. Through health sciences education …