When Margaret Mutumba joined Western as the director of Frugal Biomedical Innovations, she brought a deep-rooted passion to address inequities in health care.
Born in Kampala, Uganda, she often travelled with her father, a public health physician, to remote parts of Africa.
“As a child, going into rural areas and seeing the disparities between these communities and where I lived in the city made an imprint on me at a young age,” Mutumba said.
She was similarly moved after returning to her homeland with a master’s degree in public health from Imperial College, London, in the United Kingdom. Working in maternal health interventions and antenatal care in rural communities, she encountered some of the 70 million people in Africa affected by infertility, and the associated stigma it brings.
“Because of my public health background, which encourages talking and trying to understand the problem so you can build solutions, I spoke to more than 2,000 women, all telling me stories of domestic violence based on the assumption that women are the cause of the infertility. These were not just rural women. These were well-educated women, working in corporate spaces, telling me that, behind closed doors, because they cannot conceive, their husbands were physically or emotionally assaulting them, and their in-laws were abusive too.”
Those stories, combined with what she had witnessed as a young child, deepened her determination to advocate for equitable health–care solutions in low-resource settings.
“I realized as a person who’s in a privileged position with the lived experience, the professional experience and the academic experience to produce research addressing the problems, it was important I use these opportunities to highlight these inequities and advance policy narratives recognizing them.”
Moving advocacy into action
Her desire to foster change and improve global health outcomes brought her to Canada in 2018 to pursue a PhD in public health sciences at the University of Waterloo. Her doctoral research focused on implementing accessible and affordable fertility services in Sub-Saharan Africa.
It also led her to launch MedAtlas, an affordable digital health platform helping patients in Africa access fertility care and mental health care.
“There’s advocacy in voicing challenges, but then there’s taking action. As a researcher coming from a context where the need is now and the infrastructure is not there to translate your published work into solutions, you have to advocate and find ways yourself to do the work to make that change.”
Some colleagues cautioned that starting a business could end Mutumba’s credibility as an academic. But, modeling the spirit she’s long observed in her mother, Irene, a “changemaker educator who encourages young people to think and act like entrepreneurs,” Mutumba’s glad to have made the move.
Margaret Mutumba (Christopher Kindratsky/Western Communications photo)
“I was answering to those 2,000-plus women with whom I had spoken,” she said. “It wasn’t enough for me to just write about what I had found. I needed to be part of the solution.”
In just three years, her health-tech start-up has grown from a team of two to 15 people, offering community-driven health-care services in a number of specialties.
“It’s been very gratifying. It gives me a reason to wake up every morning,” Mutumba said.
As does her role at Western, heading up the Frugal Biomedical Innovations program, a multi-disciplinary initiative focused on co-designing, developing and delivering innovative medical technologies to enhance health-care access for patients in remote and low-resource regions.
“This is an area I’m very passionate about and very familiar with,” Mutumba said. “Towards the end of my PhD program, I was interested in continuing in an academic role, but one focusing on populations that are often neglected. For me, that’s always been my drive.”
From design to deployment
What excites Mutumba most about the program is partnering with remote communities in Canada or under-resourced communities in Africa to develop and design medical devices.
“It’s important to understand the context of the partner with the talent to build sustainable solutions, and that’s what our program is doing. We’re working with people in these regions who already have ideas, but maybe just need supports that we have as strengths here at Western, whether that is academic assistance, prototype building or our lab facilities.”
Sourcing local materials and keeping the manufacturing and production of the devices within the partnering communities translates into employment opportunities and economic empowerment.
“Our goal from the beginning is to support these communities from design to deployment,” Mutumba said.
It’s a philosophy that not only excites Mutumba, but the students working in the biomedical innovation labs.
“More and more, young people want to see the value of their learning being used in society. They’re asking how they can tangibly take these skills and have an impact. It’s about more than just a grade. It’s about how their work can improve communities.”
Globally recognized innovator
Mutumba has made her mark globally, recognized for her research, innovation and advocacy.
She was a 2023 recipient of a Diaspora Award from the Uganda Diaspora Network.
Selected as part of the 2024 Women Lift Health Leadership Journey cohort, “I’ll be learning from women in leadership, charting their own paths,” Mutumba said. “I’ll also be exploring how we in academia, whose function is to educate and raise the next generation of innovators, can create a nurturing environment so more women can come into this technological development space. My work over the next 12 months is to ask that question and hopefully answer it in concrete ways.”
Mutumba, who is a consultant for the World Health Organization on Research, Development and Research Training in Human Reproduction and served as a board member of the Canadian Association of Global Health, was also recently appointed to the Board of Directors of Her Royal Highness, Queen of Buganda, Development Foundation USA.
The foundation is a non-profit organization founded to promote the voice and cultural values of the kingdom and the people of Buganda, a traditional monarchy of the Bantu people in Uganda. The goals of the foundation include improving socio-economic development through initiatives like improving access to education, and the health and living standards for children and youth.
“It’s a real honour for me, because I’m technically a subject of Her Royal Highness, in a population of about 14 million in the Buganda tribe,” Mutumba said. It’s also a role through which she hopes to help researchers learn how cultural frameworks must be considered when delivering technological interventions.
“As health practitioners, if we don’t take seriously the role of culture in health, we are doing a huge disservice to ourselves because logic or sound scientific facts sometimes do not align with culture. We need to bring cultural leaders and influencers to the table to be part of the interventions or technologies we develop, because they have more authority to bring their subjects to accept that technology and health intervention.”
“It’s complementary,” she added. “Cultural institutions need to bring the strength of academic rigour and research capacity to validate and publicize the work they’re doing. I’m hoping we can show, together, a successful model for how academia and culture can come together and deliver sustainable technologies or sustainable health interventions.”
Mutumba also hopes to work closely with members of Western’s Africa Institute to identify more partnership opportunities in creating sustainable solutions to address healthcare gaps on the continent.
“I feel I’m in the right place at the right time and I’m excited for the future of Western and the impact we will continue to have.”
