About YEI Global Health Consulting
Born from Loss. Driven by Purpose.
Yei was a young teenager who lived in a small village in Nimba County, Liberia. She was late in her third trimester when she started experiencing terrible back pain and vaginal bleeding. Knowing it would take about an hour to walk to the nearest clinic, she took some painkillers to ease the pain and hoped the bleeding would eventually stop. Fortunately for Yei, her symptoms subsided within a few hours.
However, when she went into labor a few weeks later, once again, the distance from a clinic posed a challenge for Yei.
Her husband knew that getting transportation would require them to get to the main road. With that in mind, her husband frantically grabbed the wheelbarrow, put her in it, and began pushing it. As he desperately pushed the wheelbarrow, Yei suddenly felt intense contractions and started noticing vaginal bleeding.
At that point, Yei understood what needed to be done. She mustered up all the strength she could and pushed and screamed and pushed and screamed until she saw her baby’s head. She smiled at her baby girl. This heartwarming moment ended abruptly when Yei lost consciousness and suddenly died in the wheelbarrow on the side of the road with her baby in her hands.
That baby girl grew up to become Dr. Tozoe Elaine Marton.
About the Founder
Tozoe Elaine Marton, PhD | Founder & Principal Consultant
Dr. Tozoe Elaine Marton is an applied researcher and global health consultant with over seven years of experience leading rigorous mixed-methods research across maternal health, reproductive health systems, and HIV/AIDS prevention in low- and middle-income countries.
She holds a PhD in Social Policy from Brandeis University’s Heller School for Social Policy and Management. Her doctoral research took her to Kenya, where she conducted 66 in-depth interviews with midwives, instructors, and health administrators — examining how colonial reproductive governance legacies and global health mandates shape maternal health disparities and midwife workforce preparedness today. Her work is not abstract. It is grounded in the communities, clinics, and training environments where the gap between policy and practice costs lives.
Before founding YEI, Dr. Marton built her expertise at two of the world's leading research institutions. At RTI International's Women's Global Health Imperative Center, she led a portfolio of qualitative and quantitative research projects spanning HIV/AIDS prevention, community-engaged equity research, and women involved with the criminal justice system — managing multi-site data collection across the United States and sub-Saharan Africa, overseeing IRB processes, training field research teams in Kenya, and co-authoring peer-reviewed publications. At the Population Council-Kenya in Nairobi, she designed and executed a comparative case study on midwifery training and maternal health services across urban and rural Kenya, producing policy-relevant findings on barriers to equitable maternal and newborn health outcomes.
Her research has been published in BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth, BMJ Open, the Journal of the International AIDS Society, and BMC Women's Health, and presented at international conferences, including the ReWorlding Reproduction Conference in Pretoria, South Africa. She is a recipient of the American Association of University Women's American Dissertation Fellowship — one of the most prestigious awards in the United States recognizing scholarly excellence and commitment to equity.
She teaches global health, research methods, and medical sociology at Simmons University, and serves as a Global Health Politics Fellow at Boston University's Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future.
Dr. Marton founded YEI in honor of the mother she never knew — and in unwavering commitment to ensuring that the next generation of women in Nimba County, and in every underserved community around the world, never becomes that statistic.
Core Values
Partner With Us to Advance Maternal and Reproductive Health Globally
Share your objectives, and we'll design a consulting engagement that turns your research priorities into real-world impact.