From Kakuma Refugee Camp to the World Health Organization: Kuol Maper Alier’s Journey of Resilience and Global Health Innovation

My name is Kuol Maper Alier. I was born in South Sudan, and though my early years were marked by the challenges of displacement, they also taught me resilience and sparked a strong belief in building a better future for myself.

I began my education in Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya, where I completed primary school in 2008. Life in Kakuma was not easy, but it instilled in me discipline, determination, and a vision beyond the camp’s boundaries. With support from the Catholic Diocese of Nakuru, I earned a scholarship and pursued my secondary education at a school in Naivasha, a town in central Kenya, from 2009 to 2012.

In my final year, I sat the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE). I missed a World University Service of Canada (WUSC) scholarship by a single point. It was a painful moment that could have easily ended my dream of higher education abroad but instead became a turning point. It fueled my determination to seek another path forward.

That determination carried me back to South Sudan in 2013, where I began looking for ways to fund my university education. But later that year, the political crisis forced me into the Mingkaman IDP Camp. What felt like another setback quickly became an opening: I secured a position with the International Rescue Committee (IRC), first as a Monitoring and Evaluation Officer and later as Deputy Program Manager in Ajuongthok Refugee Camp, one of the largest in the region.

Beyond employment, I saw firsthand how fragile health systems operate under immense strain. I saw how data is collected but rarely used to improve care. Patients slip through the cracks, not due to neglect, but due to weak systems. These lessons stayed with me, shaping the vision I carried into the next chapter of my journey.

Determined to strengthen my skills, I enrolled at Moi University in Kenya in 2016 to study Applied Statistics with Computing. I graduated in 2021 with Second Class Honours (Upper Division).

At Moi, I built a strong technical foundation, but even more importantly, it sharpened my sense of purpose. Numbers alone were not enough. I wanted to apply data to improve health systems and ensure every statistic translates into real change for real people. That realization set the stage for my transition into public health.

As I prepared graduate school applications in 2022, tragedy struck. My sister died from complications of hypertension, just nine months after giving birth. Her death was preventable. It shattered me. But it also gave me clarity. Education was no longer about personal advancement. It had become a tool to confront the very challenges that had touched my own family. I knew I wanted to pursue health informatics and create systems that could prevent others from experiencing the same loss. That conviction guided me into the next, life-changing opportunity.

In 2023, I was selected for the Mastercard Foundation Scholars Program at the University of Toronto. It was more than financial support – it connected me to a network of young visionaries from across Africa who challenged and inspired me.

At Toronto, I turned my personal mission into academic research, focusing on hypertension care in fragile contexts. I proposed a telementoring platform to support health workers in South Sudan as a scalable way to strengthen cardiovascular care.

I am deeply grateful to Karim Keshavjee, Program Director of the Master of Health Informatics, whose guidance shaped this work. In many ways, it felt like coming full circle: transforming lived experience into solutions that could change lives.

That same spirit guides me today in my role as Data Manager at the World Health Organization. I support health information systems in one of the world’s most complex humanitarian settings. The challenges are immense – poor internet, fragmented reporting, and data coming from the hardest-to-reach places. But every challenge is an opportunity to prove what data can do when it’s put to work.

I have seen timely information trigger rapid emergency responses, improve program coverage, and strengthen collaboration among humanitarian actors. One of my proudest moments was contributing to a cholera intervention that prevented a localized crisis through swift resource mobilization. These moments remind me that behind every dataset is a life that can be saved.

From Kakuma to the WHO, my journey has been shaped by setbacks, resilience, and the relentless pursuit of purpose. Each chapter prepared me for the next: the discipline I learned from Kakuma, the leadership experience at the IRC, the skills from Moi University, the clarity that came through personal loss, and the opportunity to grow at the University of Toronto.

But at the heart of it all is my experience of displacement. Growing up in refugee and IDP camps gave me a firsthand understanding of what it means when health systems fail – and what it takes to keep hope alive in fragile contexts. That lived experience continues to inspire my work today and fuels my determination to build systems that leave no one behind.

I want to deepen my contributions to digital health and health system strengthening in fragile contexts. My vision is to integrate community-based data, real-time analytics, and predictive systems to make healthcare more equitable and effective.

The Mastercard Foundation Scholars Program did not just fund my education; it expanded my capacity to serve and inspired a commitment to empower others through data-driven change. My journey from displacement into purpose proves that where you begin does not define where you can go. I hope it encourages other young people with similar beginnings to see their experiences not as limitations, but as fuel to transform their communities.