Chevening Studying in the UK Essay Example: WASH program engineer in a district health partnership

As a WASH programme engineer in Ethiopia, my recurring problem is that water points get installed but rarely stay functional. I can coordinate field responses and compile failure data across roughly 40 rural water points in Amhara, but I cannot yet model why service chains break down or judge which maintenance approaches are cost-effective across different community contexts. My first choice is the MSc Water Sanitation and Health Engineering at the University of Leeds. Three taught areas match my gaps directly: water and sanitation systems analysis, environmental health and risk assessment, and water governance and regulation. The systems area would give me tools to map service-chain failure beyond the asset; the environmental health area would link hygiene behaviour and monitoring streams that my current programmes keep separate; and the governance area would help me read regulatory design, including how the UK embeds drinking-water standards through the Drinking Water Inspectorate, a regulatory practice I cannot observe locally or through an online course. I would aim to anchor my dissertation with the Leeds water research group on a maintenance-cost model for rural Ethiopian schemes, supporting SDG 6 service-sustainability targets. My second and third choices, MSc Environmental Health at LSHTM and MSc Public Health at Sheffield, cover the health-outcome side well but treat WASH infrastructure governance as context, not core, so neither closes my service-systems gap as directly. On return, I want to build a maintenance-cost scoring sheet, test it with two district WASH teams in Amhara, and submit a short evidence note to my organisation's technical review before asking my programme manager for a slot at the national WASH multi-stakeholder forum. I still need stronger cost-benefit analysis and regulatory-design skills to make that note credible rather than descriptive, which is what I want to practise during the Leeds programme.