Letter of recommendation for Rebecca Danielle Chekaraou
Danielle Chekaraou has been working with our family charitable organization, the Gangarosa International Health Foundation, for about a year. She has shown enormous insight as she managed our cookstove development project in Ghana. As a friend and former coworker of my brother Paul, she initially volunteered her efforts and later served as a consultant.
Danielle’s inestimable expertise and enthusiastic persistence have allowed us to leverage very limited private resources to accomplish yet far more than would have been possible by a well-established and well-funded NGO. Having immersed herself in many cultures throughout her career, she has seen countless examples of misguided technological fixes for externally perceived problems that were doomed from the outset for failure, so she has committed her career to human-centered design through intensive interaction with the communities served. She worked remotely from her home in Ecuador with an energetic field manager in Ghana whom she has known for decades, and together they inspired and mobilized a team of dedicated volunteers to initiate, motivate, sustain, and begin to monitor an autonomous and self-sufficient project in a remarkably short time.
With ingenious use of human-centered design and community development, she located a village that objectively had the greatest need of our proposed intervention based on various health markers of indoor air pollution, conducted a baseline study to ascertain its health problems and self-perceived needs, engaged community leaders and citizens to identify local cooking challenges and to brainstorm stove designs to meet them, initiated a youth involvement subproject modeled after Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts intended to build and service cookstoves and to address the village’s other health needs, generated a local market for materials required to construct the improved cookstoves, and established a team house and learning center that will not only serve as a depot for building materials but also as a model public health resource for Ghana and all Africa. We plan to continue this project with less intensive effort for many more years or decades, but we feel it has clearly gotten off to the best start imaginable. We intend to continue to work with Danielle on this and other projects for as long as she wishes, to the extent where we have invited her to serve on our board of trustees.
The scope, span, and success of these efforts cannot be overstated. Danielle’s innovations set up a self-sustaining, locally motivated, and autonomously implemented public health enterprise in just 10 months! The village she has served in this way is buzzing with enthusiasm and eager to build in many other ways on the success she has fostered! Most amazing of all, she made the whole intricate undertaking look easy and routine!
In short, Danielle is among the most innovative, creative, and resourceful public health workers I have ever known. I give Danielle Chekaraou my highest recommendation.
Sincerely,
Raymond E. Gangarosa, MD, MPH, MSEE
Chief Executive Officer, Gangarosa International Health Foundation