Brendan Hayes

Lilongwe, Malawi

Brendan Hayes is projects director of Banja La Mtsogolo (BLM), a reproductive health organization based in Malawi that provides health-care services to more than 700,000 people. He oversees the implementation of an integrated reproductive health program focusing on family planning and HIV prevention for the organization, whose name translates as “Our Families of the Future.”

Brendan, a 2008 Mitchell Scholar, did an M.Sc. in Development Studies at University College Dublin and wrote his thesis on HIV prevention policy in Swaziland. He was a double history-biology major with a minor in African Studies at St. Lawrence University, and after graduation, spent two years living and working in Swaziland – first as a Peace Corps community health volunteer working on HIV education and then with the National Emergency Response Council on HIV and AIDS, helping to run an project focusing on AIDS orphans and vulnerable children.

Brendan says that during his Mitchell year at UCD, he found “a lot of people with very specific knowledge of the developing world, of a kind you might not find in the US, a different student profile – many of them mid-career people, many of them Africans.” Almost all of the friendships he made at UCD are with people still working overseas, and these have proved to be lasting ties. “Given the history of Ireland, with missionaries working overseas, it makes sense that I found myself in an environment of many people who had worked in South Asia or in Africa.”

Brendan hopes to continue working in health care. He’s been following the health care debate in the US avidly, and notes that although the issues are very different in the US and in Malawi, “Health care is a central part of all people’s lives. Trying to make health care more effective is crucially important, no matter where you are.”