Last year, Rachel Nyameyo, MPH’24 completed her online master’s of public health at Brown while founding and establishing Lulu-Afrika, a nonprofit organization that responds to public health needs in multiple African countries.
Lulu-Afrika celebrated its one-year anniversary on April 12. In just twelve months, Nyameyo and her team have built partnerships with key governmental and religious organizations and have secured over 200 acres of land for the purposes of building community-health centers and sanctuaries for people displaced by floods, hunger and sexual violence.
Nyameyo took an unconventional route to establish Lulu-Afrika. Seventeen years ago, she moved to the U.S. from the city of Kisumu, near Lake Victoria in western Kenya. She majored in biology at Texas Southern University and was accepted into pharmacy school. Tuition was expensive, however, and an encounter with a military recruiter—who was looking for conscripts who could speak Swahili—led her to pause her studies and join the U.S. Army.
Nyameyo served four years at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and another four years in the reserve service in Houston, Texas. Holding the rank of E-5 Sergeant, she is currently in the Individual Ready Reserve.
We spoke with Rachel about some of her accomplishments over the past year.
What inspired you to found Lulu-Afrika?
Nyameyo: It was born out of a personal experience that goes back to my childhood. My father is originally from Tanzania, and every holiday season, we would travel there to visit his family. His community lives among the Kurya ethnic group. While we’re from the Luo tribe—which doesn’t practice circumcision at all, not even among men—we lived in an area where the Kurya community practiced both male and female circumcision.
As a child, I was shocked to learn that girls were also circumcised. I had never been exposed to the practice, so it felt completely foreign and disturbing to me. During the December holidays, which coincide with the circumcision season, I would see public ceremonies in the streets—people dancing, their faces painted. I’d ask my father what was going on, and he explained the tradition.
But it didn’t sit right with me, especially knowing that girls—some very young—were going through this. Some would bleed to death or get infections. On top of that, circumcision was seen as a rite of passage into marriage, often to older men. Even as a child, I knew it was wrong.
As I grew older and pursued education in biology and later public health, I gained more knowledge about the consequences of this practice. That only fueled my passion to fight it. So I started Lulu-Afrika and partnered with others already working in this space. Together, we aim to end this harmful tradition.