CID Faculty Spotlight: Phuong Pham on the Role of Public Health in Peacebuilding and Development

For epidemiologist Phuong Pham, Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and CID Faculty Affiliate, public health is inseparable from peacebuilding and development. “You cannot rebuild health systems without rebuilding trust in institutions,” she says, “and you cannot sustain peace without addressing the health, development and dignity of the people most affected by violence.” Grounded in local participation and survivor-centered evidence, her work shows how public health can serve as a foundation for lasting peace and human development after war.

Her conviction is rooted in empirical, not just abstract theory, and lived experience. Pham’s journey to the field of public health began with an unforeseen return. She was in her first year of graduate studies, aspiring to attend medical school, when an opportunity arose to help launch a school of public health in Vietnam – a country she fled by boat as a child.

“The U.S. was just re-establishing diplomatic ties with Vietnam after the war, and they needed an intern who could speak Vietnamese,” she recounts. Although she looked and spoke Vietnamese, it took a long time to earn the trust of northern Vietnamese colleagues who saw Pham, who grew up in Tampa, Florida and has roots in southern Vietnam, as an outsider. 

In retrospect, Pham says, it was an early lesson in the importance of trustbuilding, especially after conflict. Young and earnest, she rolled up her sleeves and after three months in Hanoi working steadily to build capacity and train researchers, she realized she could make a greater impact in public health than medicine. By the end of her doctoral studies in international social epidemiology and development at Tulane University, she had helped establish technology infrastructure in the Ivory Coast as part of the USAID-funded Leland Initiative to improve internet connectivity in Africa. 

Over the following two decades, Pham strengthened health capacity and studied the consequences of mass conflict in over twenty countries, including Uganda, Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Cambodia, Colombia, Iraq, Syria and Ukraine. Along the way, she pioneered open-source data tools that, in turn, advanced methods for large-scale population studies in conflict settings. She is the co-founder of KoboToolbox, a data platform used by over 32,000 organizations, including the World Bank and the United Nations; and currently serves as Director of Education at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, where she oversees the university’s graduate concentration in Humanitarian Studies, and leads several projects, including the Transitional Justice Evaluation Tool, and the Local Engagement and Response Network (LEARN), which trains local organizations to respond effectively to infectious disease outbreaks. 

Working at the intersection of public health, technology, education delivery and peacebuilding, Pham recalls how the different disciplines began to coalesce in one of her first jobs building schools of public health in Rwanda and the DRC after devastating conflicts: “Every three months I rotated between Butare and Kinshasha, and just as we were making progress, another outbreak of violence or instability would interrupt the work.” Each time, she had to resume critical pieces, starting “with an empty building, physically unloading computers, setting up classrooms and labs,” laying down all the necessary infrastructure before actual epidemiology training could begin. 

While on assignment, Pham began to conduct assessments of the impact of mass atrocities on local populations and health systems, with an eye towards rebuilding. In order to rebuild a fractured country’s health system, she realized, one needed to engage with the peacebuilding and transitional justice process – the steps, judicial and non-judicial, governments take to restore peace after mass atrocities. (Typically, these steps include accountability measures, truth commissions, victim reparations, institutional reforms such as vetting and lustration, and victim memorialization efforts). Deciding what steps to take, when, and how to establish lasting peace required foregrounding the experiences and views of survivors. 

Capturing those views – in a comprehensive and nuanced way – became one of Pham’s key areas of focus. Between 2005 and 2020, Pham and her colleagues conducted over 50 polls in 15 countries, coding more than 250,000 interviews (today, that figure has grown to over 20 countries). From the outset, they faced many challenges: How do you sample fast-moving displaced populations, or conduct in-depth interviews with people speaking different dialects and languages? How do you count hidden or hard-to-reach populations? How do you collect, code and present data quickly enough to inform policy? 

Around 2003, Pham and her partner Patrick Vinck, an associate professor of emergency medicine and global health at Harvard and Director of Research at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, were collecting data on local perceptions of the reconstruction process in Iraq after the fall of Baghdad, but the turnaround took too long to impact policy. Determined to get it right on their next project in northern Uganda, Pham and Vinck recruited computer science students to develop a data management tool – KoboToolbox – that could be used in crisis environments, both on and off-line, and in multiple languages. 

“This was before the iPhone or Android even debuted, so the idea that we could directly code data in a conflict zone on portable devices sounded like science-fiction,” she jokes. But that seemingly impossible task landed a critical first investment from the MacArthur Foundation. 

Kobo, which means “transfer” in Acholi, a local dialect, “empowers those in resource-limited settings to collect and manage crucial data,” transferring information from the field to policy discussions quickly and cost-effectively, says Pham, who sees technological innovation and data equity as crucial to her mission of driving system-level change in lower-income countries.

To widen access to robust data, she co-created an online repository, peacebuildingdata.org, where two decades of systematic research on the human health outcomes of mass conflict and victims’ views of transitional justice processes can be accessed for free. The reports have been cited in numerous transitional justice policies, including Colombia’s ambitious reparations program, which aims to compensate nearly 10 million victims of the country’s long-running civil conflict, and Ethiopia’s post-Tigray transitional justice policy adopted in 2024.

As crisis after crisis converges, Pham is thoughtfully sanguine. “Right now, we’re seeing the most number of conflicts since World War II, democracy is on the decline, development funding is in crisis even as humanitarian needs are rising,” she says. Yet, Pham sees glimmers of hope, in, on the one hand, human relationships and principled actions, and on the other, emerging technologies like artificial intelligence. 

If we can bring the two together, find a way to use AI ethically, guided by human principles, she asserts, then we can drive humanity forward. The immediate challenge, which AI may be uniquely suited to solving, is how to do more with less in a field facing unprecedented funding shortages. Recently, Pham and Vinck convened a workshop on AI for humanitarian action at the Radcliffe Institute to discuss how to safeguard against misuses, develop protocols for responsible deployment in humanitarian efforts, and create training resources for policymakers and communities.

Pham’s projects, meanwhile, continue non-stop. Most recently, she completed a large-scale study of the impact of the war in Ukraine on families’ health and access to education; trained the rapid response teams that helped contain the Ebola virus in Congo last fall; and will begin training health workers in the Central African Republic and Thailand to account for a projected global shortfall of 11 million health professionals by 2030.

Even as scientists set the Doomsday Clock closer to midnight than it’s ever been in history, Pham sets store in the work of improving health outcomes for the world’s most vulnerable. She has witnessed, after all, within her lifetime the rise of Vietnam, and seen even Sisyphean tasks bear fruit: despite initial setbacks, Rwanda and the DRC established well-regarded schools of public health – centers of research that contribute to resilience in the face of crisis.

“The health and well-being of a community is a pre-condition for peace,” she says. “Without peace, there can be no durable health, and without health, peace itself cannot last.”