David Muhia

David Muhia has a PhD in the field of Tropical Diseases from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine where he was a Welcome Trust Prize Student. David’s early career was in medical research at the Welcome Trust Kenya where his focus was in Malaria, HIV/AIDS and TB. He has also worked at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine, University of Oxford. His research has resulted in numerous publications in peer reviewed international journals.

His Research work enabled him to travel to many tropical countries and to interact with many people suffering from various infectious and tropical diseases. David was intrigued by the impact of poverty on poor health. As he observed, poverty forces people to live in environments without sanitation, clean water or decent shelter. Poverty forces young girls into prostitution. Poverty denies people access to mosquito bed nets and causes preventable deaths to many children under the age of five years. Poverty creates illiteracy that makes people to take greater health risks. To David, these were disturbing observations and although he realized the enormous need of greater research to bring new and effective treatments for these ‘poverty diseases’, he started to shift his attention to finding ways to alleviate poverty among his research clients.

His studies as a Skoll Scholar on the full-time one-year MBA programme at Saïd Business School allowed him to explore in detail some poverty eradication tools such as Microfinance and Enterprise Development. After he completed his MBA, David joined forces with Chatham Financial to set up a broad and more inclusive developing countries foreign exchange hedging tool for microfinance investment funds to enable these investment vehicles to lend money to microfinance institutions based in very poor countries. David is currently working on two ventures – affordable and flexible mobile phone handsets for Africa market and affordable housing for slum dwellers in Kenya.