Guest Post: From an Award-Winning AuthorAID Grantee

[This post is from Dr. Lumbini Roy, Centre for Equity and Health Systems, International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (icddr,b). Last month, with support of an AuthorAID travel grant, Dr. Roy attended an international conference. Thank you, Dr. Roy, for this report! —Barbara]

The AuthorAID travel grant was the greatest gift I could get this year. It was like a lucky charm for me. Not only did it enable me to present at the prestigious 20th Canadian Conference on Global Health. It also facilitated my winning the Hillman Award for best poster at the conference.

Achieving the best poster award at an international conference was indeed a proud moment for me. It increased my confidence even more and rewarded me for the hard work and dedication I had devoted to working for the population in need.

This conference was highly motivating and encouraging for me as a young female professional from a marginalized indigenous “Chakma” community in Bangladesh. This community struggles for identity, dignity, and development, as well as health, and it lags far behind because of geographic, socioeconomic, and political instability. I intend to develop projects that will help understand and solve health problems of hard-to-reach communities such as my own, where the maternal mortality rate is 3 times the national average and other morbidity indicators also are elevated.

At this conference I learned strategies to address issues such as governance, accountability, and policy advocacy, which Bangladesh has been struggling for decades to implement. Also, I expressed my own perspectives on global health agendas for after 2015. My doing so drew the attention of a few international stakeholders, thus helping me to collaborate in the future.

I am thankful to AuthorAID for enhancing my scope and opportunities in public health and thus contributing to my eventually reaching the unreachable.