Auguste, Rose Anne. Nurse, social worker, and human rights activist – Born on November 29, 1963, in Jérémie, During the 1970s, she attended the Pressoir Jerome School in Jérémie, and later studied at Port-au-Prince’s Lucien Hibert College, where she received her baccalaureate in 1984. She went on to study at the national School of Nursing, getting her diploma in 1988, and while there she set up a nurses’ student union.

Auguste then worked for a variety of non-governmental organisations in central Haiti, but was in Port-au-Prince at the time of the 1991 military coup. She risked her personal safety to rescue patients at the general hospital when soldiers came to finish off those wounded while resisting the coup. In 1992, she founded the Women’s Health Clinic (Klinik Sante Fanm in creole) in Carrefour Feuilles, Port-au-Prince, in association with the Partners in Health organisation. The clinic, located in a heavily-populated hillside shantytown to the south of the capital, and originally only meant for women, treats over 200 women, men, and children each day. Auguste has also provided counselling for female victims of gang beatings and rape. In 1994, she received the Reebok Human Rights Award, which she later donated to Partners in Health in support of destitute women in Haiti.

Auguste remains outspoken about Haiti’s legacy of poverty and violence, reporting human rights abuses to international organisations and working to make the local healthcare system more responsive to victims of repression.