Raj Panjabi

Current Company

Last Mile Health — Co-Founder & CEO

From War Refugee to Global Health Leader

Raj Panjabi was nine years old when civil war erupted in Liberia, forcing his family to flee to the United States as refugees. He returned to Liberia years later as a medical student and confronted a devastating reality: the country had only 51 doctors for 4 million people. Most Liberians had never seen a physician. Panjabi co-founded Last Mile Health with the insight that the solution wasn't more hospitals or imported doctors — it was training local community members to provide primary care in the villages where they already lived.

Last Mile Health's model recruits, trains, equips, and supervises community health workers — local people who deliver essential health services door-to-door in communities that are hours from the nearest clinic. The model proved transformative in Liberia and was critical during the 2014 Ebola crisis, when community health workers became the frontline of the epidemic response.

Scaling Community Health Globally

Panjabi's TED Prize in 2017 came with a wish: to build a global movement to deploy community health workers everywhere they were needed. The resulting Community Health Academy, a digital training platform, has reached health workers in dozens of countries. Governments across sub-Saharan Africa have adopted the Last Mile Health model, and Panjabi served on the Biden administration's National Security Council as Senior Director for Global Health Security and Biodefense.

Panjabi's journey — from child refugee to MacArthur Fellow to White House senior staff — embodies the thesis that the people closest to a problem are best positioned to solve it. Last Mile Health didn't import solutions from wealthy countries; it invested in the capacity of communities to care for themselves, proving that the most effective global health interventions are local ones.