Thanks to Heller’s MA in Sustainable International Development (SID), one woman transformed her passion for social equity into the ability to make a tangible difference in people’s lives.
By Sarah C. Baldwin
Gloria Malia Mahama, MA SID’13, remembers exactly when and where her sense of social justice was born.
She and her four siblings were growing up in poverty in Bolgatanga, a town in northern Ghana, one of the poorest parts of the country. Their mother, a nurse, worked night shifts so that she could take on other jobs on her days off. From the age of 12, Mahama managed a nearby chop bar — a casual restaurant that serves local dishes — to help support the family.
One day, Mahama accompanied her mother to cash a paycheck; it was the first time the girl had ever been in a bank. When she saw a teller counting out money, her eyes widened. What is this? she wondered. How can you keep so much money in here, when people are struggling to eat out there?
“My passion was ignited,” Mahama recalls. “I thought, ‘When I grow up, this is where I want to work — with the sole aim of taking the money out and sharing it with everybody!’”
Eventually, Mahama realized that the path to fighting for a more equitable society did not lead to conventional banking. Instead, she pursued a bachelor’s degree in integrated development studies at the University for Development Studies (UDS). Northern Ghana’s first public university, UDS was established in 1992 with an expressly “pro-poor” mandate and a focus on reducing poverty and accelerating development.
After graduating in 2005, Mahama dove into the work she felt called to do. She got a job at the Ghanaian branch of Opportunities Industrialization Centers International (OICI), the vocational education nonprofit founded in 1964 in Philadelphia by civil rights leader and social activist Rev. Leon Howard Sullivan. As a community development officer for OICI-Ghana, Mahama implemented programs to protect and assist households affected by a nearby mining operation, analyzing families’ socioeconomic and food security status and recommending assistance packages for the most vulnerable. She also trained farmers in agribusiness and small business development.
Mahama went on to work directly for the mining company itself, at another site that was affecting 10 communities. There she developed policies to manage labor conditions, helped establish the company’s social responsibility arm, oversaw NGOs’ implementation of livelihood restoration programs, and devised interventions to include women in community development activities. She also outlined best practices for community engagement and conflict prevention in extractive industries.
“These experiences gave me a practical understanding of the challenges faced by underserved populations and reinforced my commitment to social development,” Mahama says.
Back to School
With seven years of development projects in Ghana under her belt, Mahama was ready to zoom out: “I wanted to understand global development issues — their similarities, complexities, and interconnectedness — and how to adapt sustainable solutions to local contexts.”
A colleague from OICI, Alidu Babatu Adam, MA SID’09, had made an impression on her. “Whenever he spoke, you could see his knowledge, his authority on social concepts and practical applications. And his research skills were just admirable,” Mahama says.
Babatu Adam, who eventually earned a PhD in mining-induced displacement and resettlement from the University of Queensland, in Australia, advised her to apply to the Heller School’s Sustainable International Development master’s program. (The program recently converged with the Conflict Resolution and Coexistence program to form the MA in Global Sustainability Policy and Management.) Mahama was intrigued by the program. Noting that Heller also aligned with her passion for social justice, she says, “I looked no further.”
Supported by a Ford Foundation International Fellowship for her commitment to social justice and community services in Ghana, Mahama arrived at Brandeis in 2011 and was thrilled to discover a “diverse, inclusive” community. In the classroom, she listened as students from around the world offered their own country-specific experiences. “It made you appreciate how common some problems are, and how people are dealing with them differently,” she says. “The courses gave us tools, but the examples shared by classmates nailed down the practical learning.”
Mahama also took classes in the MA in Conflict Resolution and Coexistence program (COEX), including one on negotiating conflict taught by Mari Fitzduff, professor emerita and COEX co-founder.
For her capstone project, Mahama drew on her experience with the mining company to show how industries can responsibly manage water resources and prevent water conflict. “I chose this topic due to concerns that future conflicts will arise from increasing water scarcity,” she says, “exacerbated by the loss of wetlands, expanding dry lands, and billions living in water-stressed regions.” Eleven years later, her thesis remains acutely relevant in Ghana, a major producer of the world’s gold supply: In the fall of 2024, thousands took to the streets of Accra to protest illegal small-scale mining, which pollutes waterways with heavy metals, destroys cocoa plantations — and poisons the miners themselves.
Joseph Assan, director of the SID program, is a fellow Ghanaian whose research also addresses political ecology and environmental issues. Assan joined Heller in 2012, when Mahama was in her second year. As someone committed to supporting the school’s international students, many of whom hail from the African continent, Assan made a point of getting to know her. The two would meet from time to time, and Assan would offer guidance on her thesis. He was struck by her curiosity, her directness and her keenness for learning — qualities he believed would make her ideally suited to lead in a cross-cultural, globally-oriented organization. “You have to get a really cool international development job,” he told her. And she did.
A Bigger Bank
True to her young ambition, Mahama went to work for a bank — not the kind of bank where she had had her social-justice epiphany, however, but an even bigger one: The World Bank.
Based in the Bank’s large Accra office, Mahama spent nine years as a social development specialist working in Ghana, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and the Gambia. Charged with ensuring that resettlement and environmental plans complied with the Bank’s social safeguard protocols, she also worked on social inclusion and gender equity efforts, and underwrote an analysis of the drivers of child trafficking in Sierra Leone.
Today Mahama is based in Kathmandu, where she continues to support the Bank’s sustainable development priorities through environmental and social risk management — but in a very different context. A poor country (according to its National Central Bureau of Statistics, GDP was $1004 in 2018), Nepal is experiencing high levels of migration, mostly of young men. Indeed, in 2020 the country lost 2.6 million emigrants; those same individuals, however, sent back more than $8 billion in remittances — nearly a quarter of the country’s GDP. In her current role as senior social development specialist Mahama promotes equality and inclusion in Bank initiatives, focusing on the needs of underserved and marginalized groups such as women and low-caste individuals.
“If we are designing a project, we have to factor social dynamics into the design to make sure that, first, it is inclusive, and second, it is well targeted,” she explains. “You don’t want to do development and further impoverish people. If building a road means you are also destroying other people’s houses or livelihoods, you have to make sure those are restored.”
Mahama says the practical skills she gained from SID — project planning, monitoring, and evaluation — inform her work in Nepal on a daily basis, adding that the program’s “interdisciplinary approach gave me a holistic perspective, allowing me to tackle these complex challenges comprehensively.”
On a field trip, Mahama encountered a poorly-housed woman next to a road newly constructed by non-Bank parties — the very road that had unintentionally taken her home from her. Mahama recalls thinking, This is not acceptable international good practice for environment and social risk management.
“I checked the data to see where her house had been. Colleagues intervened. The woman got a beautiful house. You could see her dancing with joy,” Mahama says, adding, “The most compelling reason for choosing this field is the profound sense of fulfillment that comes with making a tangible difference in people’s lives and seeing their smiles.”
Assan urges SID students to “look beyond the borders of your country of origin and be ready to go anywhere in the world, because your skill levels are needed globally.” He says he is delighted that Mahama is now putting her expertise and experience to work in South Asia: “She’s living the whole mission.”