Agnes Binagwaho

Binagwaho was born in Rwanda. In 1958, when she was three, she moved with her family to Belgium, where her father was to attend medical school. She has recalled that her parents taught her little about Rwandan culture, assuming she would never go back, but that she always considered herself Rwandan.⁠[1][1][1]

She earned a Doctor of General Medicine degree from the Université Libre de Bruxelles and completed her pediatric training at the Université de Bretagne Occidentale.⁠[2]

Binagwaho was in France when the 1994 genocide in Rwanda took place. Two years later, in 1996, she returned to Rwanda, at a time when she did not yet speak Kinyarwanda. As a pediatrician, she treated many children orphaned by AIDS, some of whom were themselves infected with HIV, which led her to prioritize HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention.⁠[1][2][1][1][1]

From 2002 to 2008, Binagwaho served as executive secretary of Rwanda’s National AIDS Control Commission, working to connect the public, private, and community sectors to improve AIDS care. According to UN data, over those six years annual AIDS deaths in Rwanda fell from 15,000 to 7,700, and new infections were halved.⁠[1][2][1]

In 2008, Binagwaho became Permanent Secretary of Rwanda’s Ministry of Health.⁠[1]

In 2011, Binagwaho was appointed Rwanda’s Minister of Health. The ministry trained 45,000 community health workers to reach poor households and provided them with mobile phones to contact doctors; she also championed a partnership with the U.S. pharmaceutical company Merck to vaccinate Rwandan girls against HPV, and about 93% of eligible girls were vaccinated. She has argued that “health is key to development” and that health equity is a business plan.⁠[1][1][1][1][1]

In 2015, Binagwaho received the $100,000 Roux Prize from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington in recognition of her use of data to improve health care in Rwanda; that same year she also received the Ronald McDonald House Charities Award of Excellence.⁠[1][2]

In 2016, Rwandan President Kagame removed Binagwaho as Minister of Health amid allegations of mismanagement of health resources. She responded that she had served from 2011 to 2016, longer than any other Rwandan health minister, that it was the president’s decision to make a change, and that she was proud of what the team she led had achieved.⁠[1][1]

That same year, she became a member of the U.S. National Academy of Medicine.⁠[2]

In 2017, Binagwaho was appointed Vice Chancellor of the University of Global Health Equity, an initiative of Partners In Health. She had conceived the university together with Paul Farmer, Peter Drobac, and others to train health professionals for the poorest communities; its initial $30 million in funding came from the Cummings Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. That same year, she was elected a Fellow of the African Academy of Sciences.⁠[2][1][1][2]

In 2019, Binagwaho joined the board of trustees of The Rockefeller Foundation.⁠[2]

Binagwaho holds an honorary Doctor of Science degree from Dartmouth CollegeDartmouth CollegeDartmouth College is a private institution of higher education in Hanover, New Hampshire, and a member of the Ivy League. Founded by Eleazar Wheelock, it received a royal charter on December 13, 1769. The 1819 Supreme Court ruling in Dartmouth College v. Woodward preserved its private status. Alongside undergraduate liberal arts education, Dartmouth includes the Geisel, Thayer, Tuck and Guarini schools. It enrolled 7,273 students in fall 2025 and held a $9 billion endowment at June 30, 2025. Sian Leah Beilock, in office since June 2023, remained president as of October 2026.Open the full entry and earned a Ph.D. from the University of Rwanda College of Business and Economics with a dissertation on children’s right to health in the context of the HIV epidemic. Her academic and advisory roles have included senior lecturer in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, professor of global health delivery at the University of Global Health Equity, adjunct clinical professor of pediatrics at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine, and senior adviser to the Director-General of the World Health Organization.⁠[2][2][2][2]

She has published more than 150 peer-reviewed papers on topics including health equity, HIV/AIDS, information and communication technology in e-health, and pediatric health care delivery; she has also served on the Global Task Force on Expanded Access to Cancer Care and Control in Developing Countries and on several Lancet commissions.⁠[2][2][2]

University of Global Health Equity: Official website: https://ughe.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[3]

The Rockefeller Foundation: Official website: https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[4]