Dr. Deborah Rose is the President of the Helping Africa Foundation and the Founder of the Yamoransa Model for Sustainable Development.
Deborah Rose is a population scientist and data analyst. She has a Bain Culture and Behavior, with an MPH, and PhD in Public Heath from Yale University; an SM in Population Studies from the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health; and in-depth training in Ecology and in Global Health from the Johns Hopkins University. She has retired from a two-decade career as a health officer in the US Public Health Service, and has advised the governments of Mexico, Hungary, and Taiwan on their health survey systems.
Participating in a homestay program in Chile during high school deepened her love of the Spanish language and brought an appreciation of differences and similarities between cultures that are both more subtle and more profound than they might appear.
She was an early adopter of the microcomputer and set up computer learning labs at the professional schools of Public Health and Nursing at Yale. Within those labs, she designed and taught courses that incorporated hands-on training in research methods, data collection and statistical analysis. The course and required final research project taught master’s students to learn and use the basic types of software, as explained in the textbook that she wrote. In 2015, she conceptualized and led a conference on national identity systems at the Harvard FXB Center for Health and Human Rights, where she remains a Visiting Scholar.
She first arrived in Ghana in 2012 on a two-week service trip sponsored by the Yale Alumni Service Corps, but the friendliness of the Ghanaian people and the brevity of the trip left her wanting more. In 2014, her uncle, Daniel Rose introduced her to Mr. Japhet Aryiku, the man to see for any government services one might need in either country.
While Yale had helped the crossroads village of Yamoransa, Ghana to build the ICT Center that the leaders had requested, no one had made plans to install the computers. In 2016, Deborah queried the One Laptop Per Child user group community for help and was introduced to Mr. Kafui Prebbie. He had formed two companies to set up, equip and manage computer learning labs in Ghana, just as she had done as a volunteer for community centers and libraries in Connecticut.
After the building and equipping the first three learning labs in Ghana, Japhet, Kafui and Deborah conferred and realized they had each helped set national goals or had gathered data to track national and international development goals. That insight spawned the Yamoransa Model of Sustainable Development. With additional skills provided by friend Jonathan Wiesner and Yale classmate Mary Pearl, we are all having too much fun on this journey together!
