Marie-Claire grew up in a hillside village four hours from the nearest hospital. Her mother sold cassava in the market. Her father had died of an illness no one in the family ever named, because no one had ever been able to afford a diagnosis.
She was accepted into nursing school at nineteen. The tuition — about twelve hundred dollars a year — was equivalent to her mother's entire annual income. She would not have gone, except that an institutional partner reimbursed her fees in exchange for a four-year commitment to serve at a public hospital after graduation.
This is the model the fund favours: tuition support tied to local service. The graduate is not a debt. The graduate is the point. By Year 10, the network aims to support more than fifty thousand healthcare workers through this kind of partnership.
Marie-Claire now works in the same district hospital where her father, two decades earlier, did not get a bed. She has two younger sisters at home. Both, she has decided, will finish school.
“My grandmother could not read the certificate. She held it the way other people hold a photograph.”