NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Dr. Wendy Leonard founded The Ihangane Project in 2008 as a means of inspiring local health system innovation to provide high-quality health care to vulnerable people in resource-limited settings. Her passion for global health began when she served as the first physician to volunteer for the Clinton HIV/AIDS Initiative’s HIV clinical mentoring program in Rwanda. In the United States, she is the director of Santa Cruz County’s HIV Quality Management Program and has served as the county’s tuberculosis controller since September 2007. She is the Aspen Institute’s Spotlight Health Scholar for 2016. In Ruli, Rwanda, The Ihangane Project acts as a social innovation laboratory for creating effective and resilient frontline health care delivery systems.