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. The Harvard Ministerial Leadership Program established the Tessa Jowell Fellowship to support doctoral research at Harvard focusing on issues of priority to countries participating in the Harvard Ministerial Program.

Kanyeka’s research focuses on the financing gap facing youth- and women-led Micro, Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (MSMEs) in Tanzania and the inability of MSMEs to access formal bank credit. This inequity restricts business growth, job creation, and household liquidity. Through this fellowship, she will assess whether alleviating structural capital constraints for youth-led MSMEs stabilizes household incomes, whether income stabilization influences health outcomes, and whether AI-enabled alternative credit scoring can provide a better alternative model for lending to youth and women-led MSMEs.

“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.

Kanyeka previously served as Chief of Party for a USAID-funded project in Tanzania, where she worked with communities in rural areas on youth economic empowerment, governance, and health. She later joined UNICEF’s Global Innovation team, where she worked on GIGA, a school connectivity initiative in partnership with Dell and Ericsson that uses large language models (LLMs) to map schools and connect more than 40 schools to the internet. She credits the experience she gained working on these projects as inspiration for the research she now conducts in emerging markets.

As part of her research, Kanyeka will be collaborating with the Ministries of Youth, Finance, and Planning in Tanzania, as well as local municipalities, banking sectors, finance experts, and the youth and women themselves. Her goal is to unlock capital for young people and women and track the effects that increased MSME profitability has on public health.

“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.”