On April 22^nd, 2026, the Harvard Ministerial Leadership Program awarded the Tessa Jowell Fellowship for Doctoral Research to Ngasuma Kanyeka, a Doctor of Public Health (DrPH) student at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Kaneyka was the Chief of Party for a Tanzania USAID project where she worked with communities in rural Tanzania on youth economic empowerment, governance, and health. From there, she worked for UNICEF’s Global Innovation Team on a school connectivity project called Giga; in partnership with Dell and Ericsson, using LLM’s to map schools and connect over 40 to the internet. Kanyeka credits the experience she gained working on these projects as inspiration for the research she conducts in emerging markets. With this fellowship, Kayenka will carry out research to unlock capital for young people and women and eventually track how this could be a sustainable way to tackle public health.

“I have always been deeply interested in the pathways to wellbeing (Salutogenesis) rather than the pathways to disease (Pathogenesis). Wellbeing is a more abundant opportunity to explore solutions and anchor on what makes life worth living,” Says Kanyeka. Her research focuses on the financing gap in Tanzania for youth and women-led Micro, Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (MSMEs) and the inability of MSMEs to access formal bank credit. An inequity that is restricting the growth of MSMEs businesses, the ability to create jobs, and household liquidity. The research will assess if alleviating structural capital constraints for youth-led MSMEs stabilizes household incomes, whether income stabilization influences health outcomes or not, and whether AI-enabled alternative credit scoring can provide a better alternative model for lending to youth and women-led MSMEs.

The Harvard Ministerial Leadership Program established the Tessa Jowell Fellowship to support doctoral research at Harvard focusing on issues of priority to Ministers participating in the Harvard Ministerial Program. Ngasuma Kanyeka will be collaborating with the Ministries of Youth, Finance, and Planning in Tanzania, as well as local municipalities, banking sectors, finance exports, and the youth and women themselves, to further her research. Kanyeka’s goal with this research is to unlock capital for young people and women and track what effects it has on public health when their MSMEs make profit. “Public health, like banking, has often been shy to explore outside of its traditions,” says Kanyeka, “This could be a more sustainable way to tackle public health than we have been willing to explore before.”