“Philanthropists can fund robust health programs and the best minds,” Ansara says, “but if you don’t have clean and safe spaces in which to deliver those services, you don’t have what’s needed to deliver quality healthcare. That’s the extraordinary value of infrastructure.”
Build Health International (BHI) Co-Founder and Managing Director. Jim Ansara, and his spouse and BHI board member, Karen Keating Ansara, were featured in Inside Philanthropy.
Jim, who is the founder of Boston-based Shawmut Design and Construction, sold his company to employees and used half the proceeds to establish the Ansara Family Fund with Karen. His philanthropic path took a defining turn in 2010 when a catastrophic earthquake struck Haiti just as he was preparing to build a small community health clinic there. Instead, he helped construct a massive 200,000-square-foot national teaching hospital from scratch amid decimated infrastructure.
That experience led Ansara to co-found Build Health International (BHI) with Dr. David Walton of Partners In Health. Over 12 years, BHI has worked on more than 250 healthcare facilities across 70+ countries in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia to deliver high-quality and dignified care.
The article highlights several BHI projects, including a maternal health center in Sierra Leone built largely by women, a cutting-edge genomics lab in Nigeria, and a rural clinic in Uganda now capable of facilitating 1,000 births per year. The Ansara’s work demonstrates that philanthropists can play a fundamental role in infrastructure investment and that even incremental projects can transform health outcomes for generations.