رسالة تحفيزية لمنحة ماجستير في الصحة العامة

In March 2022, a health centre in Gedaref State ran out of malaria treatment for eleven days1 at the height of the season. The medicine was not missing from the country. It was sitting in a district store forty kilometres away, because nobody had reported that the centre was running low. I was the supply officer for the twelve health centres in that programme, so the gap was mine to close.

I designed a one-page monthly consumption form and a shared spreadsheet that showed each centre’s stock against its use, and I trained 24 health-centre staff to fill it in, often over the phone. Within a year, stock-outs of malaria treatment across the twelve centres fell from nine a quarter to two2. The tool was simple. The hard part was persuading busy nurses3 that reporting on time would come back to them as medicine on the shelf.

That work showed me both what I can do and where I stop. I can keep medicines moving through a district. I cannot yet answer the questions that decide whether a programme works4: how to estimate need when population figures are years old, how to evaluate an intervention that started without a baseline, and how to argue for a budget with evidence a ministry will accept. The Master of Science in International Health at Heidelberg University is designed for people at this point in their careers. Its courses on health systems and on planning and evaluating programmes speak directly to these gaps, the field placement would let me test methods in practice, and I would learn from classmates who run health services in settings much like mine.

After the degree I will return to Sudan’s health sector. My aim is to lead supply planning for a state or national programme, and to build a stock dashboard simple enough for a health centre to use offline, on one phone. Without a scholarship, a master’s abroad is out of reach for me. With it, the skills would go back into the health system that trained me5.