A mid-career pivot from corporate life to public health entrepreneurship
Zeenith Ebrahim, DrPH ’25, launched Jamii Life in South Africa to increase access to affordable home care and create jobs.
Zeenith Ebrahim spent her DrPH program honing the skills to grow her social venture Jamii Life, a South Africa-based home health care company that’s empowering care workers with tools and training to improve the quality of home-based care and harnessing technology to help keep its services accessible and affordable. She left a successful corporate career seven years ago to explore public health entrepreneurship and graduated from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health this month committed to making a difference.
“I want a world where everyone who needs access to home care can have it, regardless of their socioeconomic status,” she said. “And where the people who provide that care are paid a living wage and respected for the crucial role they play in society.”
Jamii Life’s home care workers provide support with a range of tasks from bathing and household help to vitals checks and wound care. They track details about patients’ health outcomes and emotional well-being and keep doctors and family members informed. Over the past five years, Ebrahim has grown her team to 14, trained 92 care workers, and helped many others gain home care working skills through the company’s training program.
For Ebrahim, Jamii Life’s mission is deeply personal. Growing up in Cape Town, South Africa, she was surrounded by an extended village of caregivers—including her grandmother, who watched her and her siblings while her mother was at her teaching job. When her grandmother had a stroke and became bedridden, Ebrahim’s family could not afford to hire help, so they cared for her themselves. The experience opened her eyes to the urgent need for more home care options.
“Finding ways to contribute to my community has been the through-line in my career,” Ebrahim said. After studying business at the University of Cape Town and Oxford University, she spent more than a decade in leadership roles at General Electric in South Africa, working on transportation projects and helping enable access to health technology across the continent.
Although it was rewarding to work on improving infrastructure, she found herself wanting to do something to help people more directly—especially after her grandmother passed away in 2016. Two years later, she stepped away from her career to go back to school and start developing the concept for what would become Jamii Life.
‘Just me and my ideas’
In 2018 she was awarded a South Africa Fellowship and was accepted into the mid-career MPA program at Harvard Kennedy School (HKS). Later that academic year, Ebrahim was also awarded a Cheng Fellowship from the New World Social Innovation Fellows Program, based at HKS. Through this platform, she received mentorship, seed funding, and the support of her Cheng Fellowship cohort to develop Jamii Life. After she graduated in 2019, she won the Skoll Early Venture Award from Oxford University, was recognized as an Echoing Green Fellow and MIT Solver.
Returning to South Africa, Ebrahim dived into developing Jamii Life’s training program and technology platform. By February 2020, she had recruited 10 caregivers—and then, a month later, COVID-19 shut everything down.
Even without the pandemic’s disruptions, it was a challenging time for Ebrahim. “In the corporate world I had a title and a team, but now it was just me and my ideas,” she said. She eventually started piecing together a new temporary program—training family members and others who lived with people who needed care. But she realized that to grow the company long-term, she needed additional skills and resources. She applied to Harvard Chan School, she said, hoping to gain space to learn and be curious about health and social care, and access to a community of innovators.
Finding her voice
When she started her DrPH program in 2020, Ebrahim said, “I designed my program around moving Jamii Life forward. The School gave me the scaffolding to do that and was an extremely nurturing place.” She received funding for her education through a Margaret McNamara Memorial Fund Fellowship and a Prajna Fellowship.
Ebrahim’s doctoral project focused on how public and private sectors can collaborate to create and sustain care work in South Africa. “That helped me understand the broader landscape and the limitations that care workers face,” she said.
Being at the School proved to be personally transformative, she said. For example, Ebrahim had always found fundraising challenging and took to heart advice she received through her program. A fellow student suggested that she think of fundraising not as asking for money for herself but for her community. And a mentor challenged her by asking why she deserved her spot at Harvard if she wasn’t going to make the most of it. She said that these comments made her realize that just having talent wouldn’t be enough to make her venture successful—she had to find the courage to seize opportunities and ask for what she needed.
She loved serving as a resident adviser at Shattuck International House, which houses Harvard Chan students, an experience that helped her become more social. “I really need community but I’m an introvert,” she said. “In this role, I arranged social events, which I might not have had the courage to do. It was a great way to meet people, and it really made Boston feel like home.”
As Ebrahim’s time at Harvard comes to a close, she recalled the goals she had when she started at HKS seven years ago. “I said that I came to find my voice. At that point, I was in a senior role and had a corporate voice, but not my own,” she said. “Finding it has been an important part of my development as a leader and I’m very grateful.”
Quick hits
Favorite way to unwind: Cooking and eating. There is a lovely vegan chocolate brownie that I really like to make. Cooking is how I show love; it’s how my mother and grandmother show love. Seeing people I love enjoying a meal is one of my favorite things.
Something people might not know about me: I really like design. I can spend hours on a presentation or on deciding where to put things on the walls of my apartment. If I were not doing this work, I would probably be doing some sort of interior design.
A TV show and book I like to recommend: The Two Popes. It’s one of my favorite shows that I’ve watched in a long time and it felt particularly important given Pope Francis’ recent passing. For a book, I’d recommend Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect. It’s written by a restaurant owner and is about how to treat people in the service industry, but I believe its relevant across all industries, even the care economy.
