Dr. Christian Ntizimira is the author of an African book bestseller in death and dying, “The Safari Concept: An African Framework on End-of-Life Care,” and the Founder/Executive Director of the African Center for Research on End-of-Life Care (ACREOL), a non-profit organization to bring socio-cultural equality through “Ubuntu in End-of-life Care” in Africa. He is a Fulbright Alumnus and graduated from Harvard Medical School, Department of Global Health and Social Medicine. He has been vetted as an Ashoka Fellow (2025) and named one of the 100 Most Influential CEOs in Oncology.
Dr. Ntizimira is the winner of the prestigious Tällberg-Stervos Niarcos Foundation-Eliasson Global Leadership Prize 2021 for his passionate advocacy for palliative care in Rwanda and elsewhere in Africa, grounded in his deeply held belief that dignified end-of-life care is a human right. He pioneered the integration of palliative care and end-of-life care into health services rendered to Rwandan cancer patients and in community settings. He developed a model of palliative care that has been scaled to cover 13 districts and 16 hospitals in Rwanda, serving 6,840,592 people, over half the national population, across 7,144 villages (Imidugudu). By training 1,171 healthcare professionals, we have built a sustainable workforce that replaces “medical anonymity” with the Ubuntu-based The Safari Concept.
In 2018, he became the first advocacy/policy champion among extraordinary individuals who are making a significant contribution to developing palliative care in low- and middle-income countries for the World Hospice and Palliative Care Alliance (WHPCA). From 2010–13, he was the director of Kibagabaga Hospital in Kigali. He has advised several governments on national palliative care policy, including Burundi, Rwanda, and Senegal, on access to palliative care services. He was a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee for the Lancet Commission on Global Access to Palliative Care and Pain Control. Ntizimira graduated in medicine from the College of Medicine and Health Sciences at the University of Rwanda in 2008. In 2011, he received a scholarship to study palliative care education and practice in the United States of America at Harvard Medical School’s Center for Palliative Care. He also trained as an African Pain Policy Expert at the University of Wisconsin. Ntizimira was named Young Cancer Leader by the Union for International Cancer Control in 2016 and Distinguished Young Leader by the Harvard Global Health Catalyst in 2017.
