Chevening Leadership and Influence Essay Example: WASH program engineer in a district health partnership

In rural Ethiopia, water points often fail not from poor construction but from the absence of any system to track breakdowns. As a WASH program engineer in a district health partnership, I saw repairs stay reactive across 28 water points serving six villages, with no shared record of recurring failures. I built a simple maintenance tracker and convened monthly reviews with health workers, water technicians, and village committee members. Getting people into the room was the harder part. Technicians were used to responding only to urgent calls, and two committee chairs questioned whether the meetings were worth their time. I had no authority over them, so I relied on the log. When a technician dismissed one recurring failure as user error, I presented the record showing three repairs at the same point in four months. The conversation moved from blame to root cause, and the chair asked that the same log be reviewed at the next session. Over four months, attendance rose from roughly 60 percent to above 90 percent, and using the same tracker fields, average downtime per incident fell from about 14 days to 7, with repeat-failure points dropping from nine to four. One village chair told me, "We used to wait weeks. Now we decide together." For households, that meant fewer days walking to distant sources during the dry months. What I learned is that influence here depends on making evidence legible, not on rank. I want to study infrastructure asset management in the UK, particularly maintenance planning and institutional routines, then return to pilot the tracker and a peer-led review in one neighbouring woreda. I will ask the district WASH coordinator to sponsor it, share the method with two Chevening alumni for critique, and judge success by downtime and committee adoption after one planning cycle.