Alumnus Spotlight: Bolun Li ’16 Scaling up Impact from Grassroots Organizations

Bolun Li

Bolun Li appears in a graphic for a Diinsider global campaign for Change Magazine last summer.

Published January 15, 2018 under Alumni Stories

Master of Science in Global Health (MSc-GH) alumnus Bolun Li ’16, from Jinzhou, China, is passionate about providing sustainable and scalable healthcare for low-income communities. This is the motivation behind his social enterprise, Development Innovation Insider (Diinsider), which connects grassroots organizations to resources they need.

Prior to his time at the Duke Global Health Institute (DGHI), Li worked on a nutrition project with the Rural Education Action Program, a Stanford research organization dedicated to discovering the causes of poverty in rural China and creating simple, yet effective solutions in education, health and nutrition policy. This experience, coupled with HIV/AIDS prevention work in Kenya, introduced Li to the field of global health and led him to the MSc-GH program.

Learning in the Classroom and Beyond 

Li felt challenged by the rigorous curriculum in the MSc-GH program, but he remembers his academic experience at Duke fondly. “DGHI gave me the opportunity to experience a structured way of learning and critical thinking,” he said. “My professors and classmates were inspiring and amazing.”

His favorite class was “Health Systems in Developing Countries,” in which he learned about diverse perspectives in global health governance. “That course gave me a real sense of policy and practices in the global health field,” he said.

In addition to his coursework, fieldwork with grassroots organizations gave Li the vision to start Diinsider a year later. His fieldwork brought him to Cambodia, where he carried out an environmental health research project to examine the health impacts of clean cook stoves and fuels. Li and his team conducted household surveys and utilized data from stove usage monitors. 

Li’s experience in Cambodia taught him a few critical lessons that have stuck with him. First, sustainability is one of many significant challenges in grassroots development work. And secondly, data is vital to the success of interventions. 

Read Li’s 2017 blog post for more of his reflections on what he learned while at DGHI.

Scaling Up Health Care for Low-Income Communities

After graduating from Duke, Li co-founded Diinsider, an initiative that connects grassroots social impact organizations with forefront intellectual resources, international talent and investors to scale up impact. The organization also assists investors in identifying outstanding practices of social innovation and making decisions about which enterprises to support. 

Currently more than 100 small and medium-sized social impact organizations in emerging countries have registered their project needs through Diinsider’s database, and Diinsider is working to match these organizations with potential investors, mentors and partners.

A central component of Diinsider is their media platform, Change Magazine, that currently has a monthly audience of more than 50,000 readers. The magazine publishes stories around a monthly theme, such as community health care, renewable energy and social entrepreneurship.  

Diinsider is based in Beijing, China, but also has a team in Manila, Philippines. They partner with startup social enterprises—many of them health-related—from Cambodia, Myanmar, Indonesia and Vietnam. Other Diinsider cofounders included Zhe Kong, Gladys Llanes, Violet Wang, Zhi’ang Wang and Nigel Shen. 

Li says his DGHI fieldwork experience has helped guide the development of Diinsider: “My fieldwork empowered me to learn more about grassroots work and understand the real needs of people on the ground, as well as the challenges small organizations face,” he reflected, “and this knowledge has been invaluable in my current work.”

DGHI gave me the opportunity to experience a structured way of learning and critical thinking.

Bolun Li, MSc-GH ’16