Caroline Wheatley, MPH/MSW ’13, tackles HIV, TB in Mozambique

When she was an MPH student at the Brown School, Caroline Wheatley selected Mozambique as the country she wanted to focus on in her Global Hunger and Undernutrition class. That focus led to her current work in that country. For the last year and a half, Wheatley has worked in Mozambique for the International Organization for Migration (IOM), an affiliate of the United Nations, in the Migration Health Division.

“The class helped me understand how to truly collaborate and incorporate different aspects of a public health problem into a solution,” she said. “This has been instrumental in my work with IOM, because we are constantly working to bring migration into programs and policies.”

Migration is the biggest driver of HIV and TB in Southern Africa and HIV and TB are the highest in the world in this region. She manages a program called “Project Pfuneka” (meaning “to be helped”) in Mozambique that aims to help a particularly vulnerable community affected by migration.

“I work directly with a community-based organization and help them with capacity building and implementation of activities focused on TB and HIV prevention and impact mitigation,” she says. “We do a lot of work on gender, as this is a key driver of the epidemic in addition to migration.”

Wheatley is also now the project manager for a new migration and health project starting up in Gaza.  She’ll be looking at strengthening a government program and tailoring it to migration-affected communities, with strong secondary-school and community-intervention components.

If that wasn’t enough, she’s also continued doing program evaluation and strategic planning projects for her consulting company, most recently a regional Save the Children program evaluation of their migrant children’s rights project in Mozambique, South Africa, and Zimbabwe.

Wheatley credits numerous Brown School classes as preparing her for the real-world challenges she’s facing now.

“Last month I was at an IOM training in project design and implementation and I thought: ‘Wow, I learned all of this in my MPH!’