Peace Kasanga, Finance Officer

“The way I think about family planning and reproductive health has tremendously changed my own life and my family,” says Peace Kasanga, finance officer with IntraHealth’s Tanzania Human Resources Capacity Project. Although Peace’s own work deals with managing IntraHealth’s financial assets, she has learned a lot about health through her job. Peace now shares family planning and reproductive health information with family and friends, and she encourages young men and women to seek careers in the health sector.

Peace’s two sisters inspired her to pursue a career in accountancy: one sister is an accountant, and the other teaches accountancy at the university level. Though she previously thought she would become a civil engineer, Peace has no regrets about her chosen field and loves working with numbers and supporting projects in finance-related areas.

Very early in her career, Peace’s work exposed her to the importance of health projects. “My first field placement was working for the reproductive and child health section of the Ministry of Health in the finance department; this eventually led me to become finance officer and brought up my passion for working with health-related projects.”

It was that passion that led her to IntraHealth in 2004, when she started working as a consultant, supporting administration and finances for IntraHealth in Tanzania during the final part of the PRIME II Project. In 2006, IntraHealth hired her to work full-time.

“What I like most about my job is the way I follow the journey of money—I am fascinated to see the effects that money can have when injected in certain project activities.” For example, funding was used to develop and train a new group of workers—parasocial workers—to identify and then meet the needs of the most vulnerable children, especially those orphaned because they have lost parents to HIV/AIDS. One eventual outcome of this “injection” of money was that more children received medical care as well as resources to attend school.

“I am always inspired by IntraHealth’s vision and mission,” Peace says, “because I believe in them.”

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