Ghanaian MacLean Sarbah, has landed at The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the world’s largest charitable foundations, serving as the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Leader at the Global Health Office of the President.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is an American private foundation founded by one of the World’s richest men, Bill Gates and his ex-wife, Melinda French Gates.
Based in Seattle, Washington, it was launched in 2000 and is reportedly the second-largest charitable foundation in the world, holding $69 billion in assets as of 2020.
This achievement, which ironically falls in line with Mac Sarbah’s mission for social impact, would have remained a dream but for the determination and resilience of a young man to overcome the shackles of poverty and inequality at Yeji, a rural town in Ghana’s Bono East Region.
Life in rural Ghana like many parts of Africa, as against urban living, gives one an undue disadvantage in life’s opportunities, leaving many behind life’s race with unfulfilled dreams.
However, Mac Sarbah, with the gift of a disciplinarian father who valued education amid destitution, learned the hard way, sometimes studying with kerosene lanterns without electricity through his primary and junior high school days.
As a member of a family of eight children who shared a small room, Mac was certainly not born into luxury. His days included waking up early in the mornings to fetch heavy loads of water at Volta Lake, several kilometres away from home.
Mac, who was abandoned by his mother when he was less than two years old, described his father, who had no formal education, as a disciplinarian whose guidance shaped him academically in his early years.
“My father would sit in his armchair and watch me study from 7:00 to 10:00 pm. Then I would wake up the next morning and do it all over again.”
MacLean Sarbah, affectionately called Mac, had to work harder by himself when his pillar of support, a disciplinarian father left Yeji to seek medical care after he was hit by a stroke just when Mac was about to enter Senior High School.
Determined not to become a product of his environment, Mac commenced his secondary education first at the day Yeji Senior High Technical School before choosing to repeat form one at the Adidome Day Senior Secondary School in Ghana’s Volta Region. Mac’s choice of a rural secondary school was decided by poverty as that was not his first choice.
There were many days he walked several kilometres to school and even worked as a teenager on farms for sustenance. Through the support of a few dedicated teachers, Mac excelled in his academics, winning an award for the best student in the North Tongu District of Ghana’s Volta Region.
At the ceremony where Mac was honoured as the best student in the district, the level of deprivation forced him to borrow a friend’s clothes and shoes before he could attend.
As one of the few students to pass Senior Secondary School exams, Mac enrolled at the University of Ghana in 2002. Yet again, he faced financial struggles in his academic journey.
“I had no place to sleep during my first years, so I slept on the floor on a thin mattress in an extended family member’s room in Akuafo Hall” he recalls. Life at the University was tough. Sometimes, I didn’t have money for food, but I never gave up.”
Amid the struggles, Mac outpaced himself once again, receiving an academic excellence award in his second year before graduating from the University of Ghana in 2006 with a First Class Honours in Bachelor of Arts in the Social Sciences.
The United States Journey
Mac saw the light at the end of the tunnel when he emigrated to the United States after graduating from the University of Ghana. He won the US visa lottery – the dream of many citizens of developing countries, especially young Africans.
But upon arriving in the United States of America, the beginning was not rosy. Mac worked as a cart pusher at a Boston bus terminal, sleeping on another Ghanaian immigrant’s couch before later sharing a tiny room in a dirty, bed bug-infested apartment with other immigrants from Latin America.
“My sister visited me and was sad to see these little creatures suck the blood out of me. It wasn’t a smooth transition. It was cold. I was on my own. I was depressed, and I would often burst into tears” Mac shared. He remembers a friend from church seeing his tiny room and telling him, “You are living in squalor.”
The turning point in the US
Academic doors opened for Mac to pursue further studies at Ivy League schools, eventually giving him the respite and fulfilment he had always aimed at.
He was admitted into Columbia University in 2010, where he earned a Master of Arts in Social-organizational Psychology and a sixteen-credit Advanced Graduate Certificate in Cooperation and Conflict Resolution in 2012 from The Morton Deutsch International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution (MD-ICCCR) under the tutelage of renowned conflict resolution scholars and experts Morton Deutsch and Peter Coleman.
Mac again gained admission that same year into the University of Cambridge earning a Master of Philosophy in Innovation, Strategy and Organisation in 2013 at the Cambridge Judge Business School.
A disaster then struck. Mac lost the only parent he had known, his father – John Kwame Mensah Sarbah in 2016.
“I wish my father was alive to see what I plan to achieve. I wish he was alive to enjoy the fruit of his labour” Mac said in 2018.
Mr Sarbah did not allow himself to break down from his father’s demise. He shook off the pain of losing a dear one and challenged himself to achieve even more to honour his father’s memory.
He applied to another Ivy League school – Harvard University, from where he graduated with a Master’s in Design Studies in Risk and Resilience in 2019.
Mac, who had faced numerous struggles along his academic journey before achieving success, said he never allowed himself to be put down by adversity.
Relying on his experience of overcoming obstacles and failures, he established an initiative known as EdAcme to help young people from underrepresented and marginalized communities with mentorship and guidance, which he led before he joined the Gates Foundation.
“EdAcme was born to help young people achieve their biggest goals, to help maximize their potential, and to help them be the best they can be,” Mac told Ghana Web in an interview in 2020.
Mac Sarbah, once a middle and high school volunteer teacher at Mepe, a town in Ghana’s Volta Region, together with other citizens of the town, raised funds to put up an internet facility for students at the senior secondary school in the town and to support the residents after the devastating floods of 2023 from the Akosombo dam spillage.
The little but significant honour
In January 2019, Mac’s Grass-to-Grace Story and contribution to the primary and Junior High School he once attended, Bonsu Royal Educational Complex at Yeji in the Bono East Region was acknowledged.
The authorities of the school named a school block after him after he had been invited to speak to the students about the power of education.
In shock, Mac said, “They [The school] ended up planning a festival in front of about 2,000 school children. They were really inspired. It was surreal. I’m so grateful to the school,” he told Myjoyonline. “In many ways, this was a recognition of the hard work and support of family, friends, teachers, classmates, staff at every school and mentors. It’s a recognition of God’s grace for the unworthy. I couldn’t have done it alone. I believe it’s for a bigger purpose than for yourself”.
Rise to Global Leadership in Social Impact
In announcing his new role at The Bill Melinda Gates Foundation on LinkedIn, Mac wrote “I’d like to thank God for the opportunity to join the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Health Office of the President as the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Leader | Senior Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Project Manager. I want to, also, thank the many people who have supported me on my journey.”
“Thanks to the generosity and vision of Bill Gates, we work toward making sure that people everywhere (especially in low middle-income Countries), no matter their circumstances, live a healthy and productive life.”
Mac Sarbah, who is also fluent in Spanish—a language he learned within ten months—leads the planning and implementation of strategies to ensure that equity is embedded in global health and that institutions in low- and middle-income countries have equitable access to essential resources and financing. Through his leadership, Mac is driving systemic changes to create inclusive environments and improve global health outcomes.
With an endowment of approximately $75.2 billion as of December 31, 2023, the primary stated goals of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) are to enhance healthcare, reduce extreme poverty across the world, and expand educational opportunities and access to information technology.