Blessing Mukuruva is a doctoral researcher at the African Centre for Migration & Society (ACMS), Wits University. He holds a Master’s degree in Migration and Displacement Studies from the same institution, completed in 2021. At the ACMS, Blessing is a researcher in the Gendered violence & poor mental health among migrants in precarious situations (GEMMS) Research Group.

His PhD research “Cross-border Mobility and Pandemic Preparedness: A Case Study of Truck Drivers at the South Africa-Zimbabwe Borderscapes examines the intersections of mobility, public health governance, and crisis response within borderscapes.

Blessing’s research interests lie at the nexus of migration, health, and governance, with a particular focus on health in transit, cross-border access to care, climate change and its implications for the health of internally displaced persons, transnational health politics, and epistemic dis/obedience in migration and health knowledge production. His research critically engages with structural inequalities and challenges dominant paradigms in global health.

He is an active member of the global Migration, Health, and Development Research Initiative (MHADRI), where he currently serves on the Early Career Researcher (ECR) Working Group Secretariat.

Through his work, Blessing contributes to advancing critical Southern scholarship on mobility and health, with a strong commitment to epistemic justice and the decolonisation of migration health research.

Publications:

Trummer, Ursula; Ali, Thowaiba; Mosca, Davide; Mukuruva, Blessing; Mwenyango, Hadijah; Novak-Zezula, Sonja (2023): Climate change aggravating migration and health issues in the African context: The views and direct experiences of a community of interest in the field. In: Journal of Migration and Health Volume 7, 2023, 100151