Early in my career, when I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Côte d’Ivoire, I worked with a nurse and a nurse-midwife in a rural village clinic. We had little medicine, fewer supplies, and almost zero support from the government.

Every day, I saw those health workers go above and beyond for their community. They used their own money to restock malaria medicines and antibiotics. They showed me the power of frontline health workers.

And later, when I was a new health officer in Haiti and Nigeria, I spent a lot of time in rural clinics and hospitals that overflowed with people dying of AIDS-related causes. Again, I worked side-by-side with frontline health workers, this time to make our clients as comfortable as possible and help them die with dignity. That was before antiretroviral therapies and the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief changed everything.

Health workers like them—along with the people whose lives we’ve changed through access to health care—are why I’m still so committed to international public health. And why I’m thrilled and humbled to follow Pape Gaye as leader of IntraHealth International while the world faces a new crisis: the coronavirus pandemic.

Now, more than ever, health workers need our support. Now is the time to apply all we’ve learned through biomedical research, data, and on-the-ground expertise andexperience in the past 40 years, and leverage and increase our investments in health workers and the systems in which they work. Those of us at IntraHealth International are doing this now and every day.

That’s a new phrase for me—“those of us at IntraHealth.” And I’m so proud to say it.

Back in the 1980s, I met a nurse named Viviane in Kigali, Rwanda. Her clients loved her and would travel great distances to see her. She was the consummate frontline health worker, doing everything she could for those who needed her.

After the genocide, Viviane disappeared. No one knew what had become of her. Until one day, I got an envelope in the mail with Congolese stamps.

“I’m alive,” Viviane wrote. “I’m in a refugee camp in the Congo.” And she was looking for information on how to provide services to the women in that camp.

Despite everything, she was still putting her clients first.

As my time as president & CEO of IntraHealth ends, I’m thinking about the incredible progress we’ve made over the past 40 years, thanks to health workers like Viviane.

As a global community, we’ve cut extreme poverty, maternal deaths, and child deaths. We’ve made contraception and education available to more women andgirls. People’s lives have improved.

I’m incredibly proud of IntraHealth and all we’ve accomplished. Our annual revenue has grown from $20 million 14 years ago to over $118 million in 2019. We’re reaching hundreds of thousands of health workers each year.

But we have more to do. And I can’t think of a better person to lead the charge than Polly Dunford, IntraHealth’s next president and CEO.

The future of global health starts here.