Grounded in practice. Driven by possibility.

I am Shuko Musemangezhi, a Zambian global health and international development specialist, researcher and author. Over the past decade, I have worked with governments, foundations, development organisations and academic institutions across Africa on a question that connects every part of my work: how do we turn what we know into progress that people can experience?

That question has taken me across public health, data systems strengthening, research, monitoring, evaluation and learning, institutional strategy and positive youth development. As Principal Advisor for Eastern and Southern Africa at Dev-Afrique Development Advisors, I help leaders understand complex challenges, identify where change is needed and develop practical ways forward.

My work has included setting up and leading Dev-Afrique’s WSH Data Labs Initiative to strengthen WSH data systems across Sub-Saharan Africa, assessing health geospatial ecosystems in Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, sitting as a core member of the Gates Foundation’s Geospatial Insights Team (GIST), building stronger national systems to increase public value, designing and leading positive youth development initiatives, lecturing and mentoring students in evidence-based Global Health, and helping global leaders use data and evidence to improve development outcomes. Across these assignments, the challenge extends beyond producing evidence. It involves understanding who can act on it, what stands in their way and what must change for better decisions to become routine.

This is the systems perspective I bring to my work. I examine how people, incentives, technology, leadership and institutional rules interact, because those relationships determine whether a promising intervention takes hold. For the leaders I work with, this means connecting research to decisions, strategy to implementation and measurement to learning.

My commitment to positive youth development began in community service and grew through advocacy, mentorship, programme design and participation in policy spaces. It has kept me attentive to a question institutions can too easily overlook: whose potential are we failing to recognise, and what does that failure cost us all? Young people need meaningful influence over the systems shaping their lives, alongside opportunities to develop their capabilities.

That concern runs through my book, Relics: Why the Old Guard Is Failing the Young and What It Will Cost Us All. It brings questions of generational responsibility, institutional change and the consequences of exclusion into a wider public conversation. If you have ever questioned whether the institutions we inherited are equipped for the society we are becoming, Relics invites you to consider what needs to change and what is at stake if it does not.

Research and teaching keep my work grounded in inquiry. I have taught evidence-based global health, epidemiology and biostatistics, supervised graduate research and contributed to peer-reviewed publications. I am pursuing a PhD in Public Health Informatics, building on training in public health, global health delivery and data science.

I bring this combination of practice, research and systems thinking to advisory engagements, speaking and leadership conversations. If you are working to strengthen a health system, make better use of evidence, develop an actionable strategy or expand young people’s influence, let us discuss the challenge you are trying to solve and shorten the distance between what you know and the life it could change.