Rachel Ndirangu knows her numbers.

“Nearly 300,000 women die annually from preventable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth, with 95% in LMICs,” says Ndirangu, the Africa Regional Director for Advocacy and Public Policy at PATH, an organization that works in countries around the world to advance health equity and close the gender health gap.

For Ndirangu, these aren’t just statistics—it’s personal.

Ndirangu was born in the Rift Valley, Kenya “in one of the very lush, green tea plantation areas” where she grew up in a family of four siblings.

At the age of three, she lost her biological mother to eclampsia, a hypertensive disorder of pregnancy that causes seizures, and one of the main direct causes of maternal deaths in Africa.

As Ndirangu got older, she became curious about the health inequities and health system challenges that contributed to her mother’s death, particularly in her region of Sub-Saharan Africa.

“It gave me a chance to start thinking critically about, you know, why did that happen? Would it have been prevented? And appreciating that it didn’t just happen to me, this happens to hundreds of families daily,” says Ndirangu.

“And I think this spurred in me the need to work in the global health space. And particularly advocating for equitable access to essential health services for women and girls.”

Now a mother of three, Ndirangu continues to grow her passion to close the health equity gap for women and girls, particularly in her region.

Her role at PATH involves identifying solutions to address policy and financing barriers and accelerate leading PATH’s work, to advance health equity, particularly through improvement in core primary health care outcomes especially related to Maternal Newborn and Child Health and advancing global health research and development.

Ndirangu focuses on advocacy and public policy work in Africa. It’s rewarding, she says, to collaborate with diverse partners including policymakers, global health partners, local advocates, and communities to bring health within reach of everyone.

But finding support from public officials and policy makers is not without its challenges.

“Policy influencing is not as easy as just presenting data, or making a human rights argument or an economic argument,” says Ndirangu.

“Advocacy must be directed to the hearts and minds of these decision makers in order to inspire action.”

For Ndirangu, this means building relationships through inclusive and continuous dialogue, which takes investments of time and financial resources. Ndirangu sees every collaboration as an opportunity to build trust, and empower constituents with a sense of ownership and political will.

Read the full article about closing the gender health gap by Amber Cortes at Global Washington.