Why she matters in 2025
Fatima Hassan is included in Africa Health 20 because she represents a form of influence that many leadership lists overlook: the ability to force health systems to answer hard questions about access, fairness, and public accountability. As the founder of the Health Justice Initiative, she uses law, research, and advocacy to challenge the structures that perpetuate inequities in access to medicines and care. Her influence is not institutional in the narrow bureaucratic sense, but it is no less real. In 2025, she remains one of the clearest voices linking health equity, transparency, and justice in South Africa and beyond, especially in debates over medicines, public-interest regulation, and the wider politics of health access.
Influence areas: Health justice; access to medicines; public accountability; human rights.
