The Jeroen Ensink Memorial Fund commemorates the life and work of Dr Jeroen Ensink.
Jeroen was an internationally-renowned water engineer and dedicated humanitarian who was a popular much-loved member of the LSHTM community. He was passionately committed to improving access to water and sanitation worldwide, including in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) where children continue to die due to the lack of essential services.
The fund was established following his tragic death in December 2015 to support MSc scholarships for talented students from sub-Saharan Africa or South Asia to undertake an MSc in Public Health for Development.
Meet Abhijit Gadewar, the 2021 Ensink Scholar
After completing my medical education at a well-known Indian medical college in 2011, I chose to work in areas where a doctor's training is a privilege and a much-needed resource. I worked in a rural health organisation in central India, working with rural and indigenous communities for over a decade.
I worked in several places with different rural communities and rural healthcare organisations before furthering my education and professional training with an MSc at LSHTM. My responsibilities were varied: I worked as a family physician, community doctor, trainer, and healthcare manager. Health equity had become the motto, and social medicine as a way of working. Gandhi's Talisman of purposefully thinking for the last man has guided me through my journey. My journey led me to my passion for primary health care, as I have come to fully realise that primary health care is incomplete without the knowledge and skills of public health.
LSHTM has always been a place of discussion, especially among people working in rural health. I started exploring the website of LSHTM and its courses, and the first thing which caught my attention was its flexibility of course modules. LSHTM has many modules helpful for people working in low-resource settings, especially MSc public health for development. However, the course fees were far beyond my capacity to pay. While exploring scholarship options, I discovered the Jeroen Ensink Memorial Fund Scholarship on the LSHTM funding page.
June 12, 2020, was one of the most memorable days in my life: I received an email of acceptance to the Jeroen Ensink Scholarship. Extremely unpredictable situations due to the Covid-19 pandemic, nationwide lockdown and travel restrictions made me nervous about learning at LSHTM. Nevertheless, LSHTM and the scholarship team have been highly supportive and flexible throughout.
The course has taught me many public health skills such as research methodology, evaluation, outbreak investigations, epidemiology and infectious diseases epidemiology. Most importantly, the teaching and course content is pragmatic. I could almost always correlate it with my working experience in rural India. On the one hand, I realised that if I had learned these skills much earlier, I would have improved my work in primary health care. On the other hand, I am happy knowing that I am now able to utilise these skills in my future career. My cohort were the best part of the course; they are from many different countries, each bringing unique public health experiences to the table. I learned a lot from them, and I am still learning from them as an alumni network.
After completing the course, I have started working in an organisation called 'Sangwari – People's Association for Equity and Health' in a northern rural part of central India. I am involved in primary health care and health system strengthening. I aim to strengthen primary health care in India through practice and public health research.
I am incredibly grateful to the Jeroen Ensink Memorial Fund Scholarship. Studying at LSHTM would have stayed a distant dream only without this support.