Before 2007, people living in the rural Burera district of northern Rwanda had little access to a health-care facility or doctors.

In addition to designing the Girubuntu school, MASS Design Group founders Michael Murphy and Alan Ricks helped select its site, get approvals, and build the organizational infrastructure to support it.

In December 2006, while in the throes of a final charrette at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, first-year student Michael Murphy took a break to attend a speech by the noted humanitarian doctor Paul Farmer.