Raj Panjabi

In 2017, Panjabi and Last Mile Health received the $1 million TED Prize to launch the Community Health Academy, a global platform leveraging the power of digital technology to support countries to modernize the training of community health workers and health systems leaders. In collaboration with several partners and governments, the Community Health Academy has launched online and mobile courses for frontline health leaders and workers seeking to strengthen primary health care at the community level. The Academy's leadership and clinical courses have enrolled over 50,000 community health leaders, health workers and others from 197 countries.

In 2017, a study on Last Mile Health's work with the Liberian health ministry, "Implementation research on community health workers' provision of maternal and child health services in rural Liberia", was published in a special theme issue of the Bulletin of the World Health Organization focused on universal health coverage and vulnerable populations. The authors of the study included Panjabi as well as researchers from the Liberian health ministry, the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College, and Harvard University. The study indicated that, in one of Liberia's most remote districts, professionalized CHWs coached by nurses significantly improved access to care from qualified providers for children suffering from diarrhea, malaria, and acute respiratory infection – increasing by 60.1, 30.6 and 51.2 percentage points, respectively. Furthermore, CHWs significantly increased the rates of pregnant women undergoing clinic-based births with a skilled provider to 84.0 percent. In addition, despite the Ebola virus disease outbreak, which caused substantial declines in health-care utilization in other regions of the country, the study showed increases in health-care use from formal providers for fever, acute respiratory infection, and diarrhea among children and facility-based delivery among pregnant women. The study noted:

An editorial on barriers to universal health coverage co-authored by Margaret Chan, the Director-General of the World Health Organization, cited the 2017 study about Last Mile Health's work in Liberia. This editorial stated: "Enhanced recruitment, training, supervision, and compensation of community health workers rapidly improved coverage with maternal and child health services in rural areas of Liberia." Multiple additional studies have documented improvements in coverage, access and quality of primary health care amongst rural families.

In 2017, Panjabi delivered a TED Talk entitled, "No One Should Die Because They Live Too Far From a Doctor." Panjabi's TED Talk has been viewed over one million times and was selected as a Top 10 TED Talk of 2017, alongside TED Talks from Pope Francis and Elon Musk. He gave additional TED talks in 2018 and 2019 on the power of investing in community and frontline health workers. Panjabi spoke on a panel hosted by The Elders in celebration of Nelson Mandela's 100th birthday in South Africa, with Former Irish President, Mary Robinson, and Former Liberian President, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. Panjabi spoke at the TIME 100 Health Summit on Closing the Healthcare Gap. Panjabi highlighted the role of investing in rural community health workers at the TIME-Fortune Global Forum hosted by Pope Francis in 2016.

For his work on building rural and community health systems, Panjabi was named as one of the TIME 100 Most Influential People in the World in 2016, one of TIME's 50 Most Influential People in Health Care in 2018, received the 2017 TED Prize, and was listed as one of the World's 50 Greatest Leaders by Fortune in 2015 and in 2017.

Panjabi delivered the commencement address at the graduation of Harvard Medical School in 2015, titled "The Power of Selfless Acts". He has delivered medical grand rounds at Harvard-teaching hospitals including Boston Children's Hospital, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Brigham & Women's Hospital, and gave a keynote address at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement's 2019 National Forum.

Panjabi was named one of the World's 50 Greatest Leaders by Fortune in 2015 and 2017, listed as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World by TIME in 2016 with a tribute from President Bill Clinton, one of TIME's 50 Most Influential People in Health Care in 2018, and received the 2017 TED Prize. He was recognized by Bill Gates in his "Heroes in the Field" series. Panjabi is a recognized social entrepreneur, receiving an Echoing Green Fellowship in 2011, a Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation Fellowship in 2013, the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship and Schwab Social Entrepreneur of the Year from the World Economic Forum in 2017. In 2015, Panjabi accepted the Clinton Global Citizen Award on behalf of Last Mile Health and numerous organizations for "their leadership and collective response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa and their continued effort to improve the health and well-being of the affected communities." In 2017, the Government of Liberia recognized Panjabi with one of Liberia's highest civilian honors: Distinction of Knight Commander in the Most Venerable Order of the Pioneers of the Republic of Liberia.

Panjabi was a co-author of the report Strengthening Primary Health Care through Community Health Workers: Investment Case and Financing Recommendations. The report found that extending the reach of the primary health care system by investing in CHW programs can deliver a high economic return—up to 10:1—and calls on government leaders, international financiers, donors, and the global health community broadly to take specific actions to support the financing and scale up of CHW programs across sub-Saharan Africa.

Following the 2013-16 West Africa Ebola epidemic, Last Mile Health partnered with the Government of Liberia and other organizations to design and scale a National Community Health Assistant Program, which has trained and equipped thousands of community health workers, nurses, physician assistants, and midwives serving 80% of the rural population. The workers in this program carry out nearly 1/3 of all confirmed malaria diagnoses in the country, have identified over 4,000 potential epidemic events, improved vaccination coverage, improved skill birth attendance, and increased the rate of children receiving medical care by over 50% in Liberia's most remote communities. As of 2019, through service, research and advocacy efforts, Last Mile Health has supported local partners working to strengthen rural frontline and community health workforces in nearly 10 countries across three continents.

Panjabi is best known as the co-founder and CEO of Last Mile Health, a non-profit organisation working to save lives in the world's most remote communities. He co-founded this organisation in 2007 with a small team of Liberian civil war survivors and American health workers and $6,000 he had received as a wedding gift.

Panjabi returned to Liberia in 2005, as a medical student.

Raj Panjabi (born February 3, 1981) is a physician, social entrepreneur and scholar. He is the co-founder and CEO of Last Mile Health. Panjabi also serves as an Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Division of Global Health Equity at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital.

Panjabi's grandparents were refugees from Sindh Province following the British Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, resettling in Mumbai and Indore in India. A generation later, Panjabi's parents migrated to West Africa, where Panjabi was born and raised in Monrovia, Liberia. After civil war broke out in Liberia in 1989, Panjabi, at age nine, and his family fled on a rescue cargo plane to Sierra Leone and eventually sought asylum in the United States, resettling initially with a host family in High Point, North Carolina.