The Power Hour: Meet Dr. Helen Yohannes, Global Health Leader
Every month, Diaspora Wallet sits down with an Eritrean woman whose career is changing the world. This month: Dr. Helen Yohannes, Director of Neglected Tropical Disease Strategy at the World Health Organization, who manages a 120-person team across seventeen countries from her base in Geneva. She is also a mother of two, a fluent speaker of four languages, and one of the most quietly formidable leaders in global public health.
The path that wasn’t planned
Dr. Yohannes was born in Asmara and moved to London at age nine. “My parents are both teachers,” she says. “Medicine was not the family trade. I just had this very specific conviction, as a child, that I wanted to work on diseases that most people had never heard of.” She studied medicine at University College London, completed her MPH at Harvard, and spent her early career in field epidemiology across Ethiopia, South Sudan, and Sierra Leone.
“Fieldwork is where you learn that a protocol written in Geneva means nothing if the community does not trust you,” she says. “And trust is not built in English. It is built in the languages people actually speak, in the spaces they actually inhabit. Being Eritrean gave me an intuition for that — I grew up navigating multiple languages and cultural codes daily. That became my professional advantage.”
On being the only Habesha woman in the room
When asked about the challenges of being a Habesha woman in global health leadership, she pauses. “I am not going to give you the polished answer about how diversity is improving,” she says. “The truth is, I have spent most of my career being the only person from the Horn of Africa in any room of consequence. That is not an inspiring statistic. It is a failure of the pipeline.”
Her advice for young diaspora women considering careers in global health: “Do not let the institution shape you more than you shape it. Your cultural fluency is not a soft skill. It is the difference between a programme that works and a programme that looks good on a donor report.”
The mentorship philosophy
Dr. Yohannes mentors twelve early-career African women through a programme she founded informally during the pandemic. “I was getting so many LinkedIn messages from young Habesha women asking the same questions: How do I get a seat at the table? How do I speak up without being perceived as aggressive? How do I navigate being underestimated?” She turned the DMs into a monthly Zoom call. Three years later, three of her mentees are now in leadership roles at major health organisations.
Concrete career blueprint
- Build technical depth first. “Advocacy without expertise is a short career. Become genuinely excellent at one thing before you diversify.”
- Say yes to the unglamorous postings. “The field office nobody wants is where you learn what actually matters.”
- Find your diaspora network early. “There are Eritrean and Ethiopian professionals in every major institution. Find them. We look out for each other.”
The Power Hour closes every interview with the same question: If you could send one message to every young Habesha woman reading this, what would it be? Dr. Yohannes does not hesitate. “You do not need permission. You were born with everything you need to lead. The institutions will catch up.”
Know an Eritrean woman whose career deserves a Power Hour profile? Nominate her at nay-na.com/nominate.
