I met Mariama on a dusty Tuesday afternoon in a small village in rural Sierra Leone. I was twenty-one, volunteering with a maternal health charity, full of the kind of naive enthusiasm that comes from reading too many books and not spending enough time in the world. Mariama was sixteen, heavily pregnant, and already a mother to a toddler who clung to her wrapper like a shadow. She was one of the many women who walked miles to the clinic, not because they were ill, but because they wanted to stay well — for themselves, for their children, for the futures they could barely afford to imagine. On my second week, Mariama didn’t come. I asked after her and was told, quietly, that she had died two days earlier from malaria. Malaria. In 2022. A disease that is preventable, treatable, and yet still kills hundreds of thousands of people every year, most of them in sub‑Saharan Africa, most of them children under five and pregnant women. The mosquito net that could have saved her had been distributed by an NGO six months earlier, but it had been repurposed as a fishing net by her husband, who didn’t understand — or didn’t believe — that a piece of fabric could stand between his family and death. Mariama’s death was not a medical failure. It was a failure of communication, of trust, of cultural understanding. It was a global public health failure. And it broke something open in me that I have never been able to close.
That experience followed me back to the UK, where I found myself unable to stop asking the same question: what makes a public health intervention succeed or fail? It wasn’t enough to have the science; you had to have the trust, the community engagement, the cultural literacy to translate knowledge into action. When I started thinking about my dissertation, I knew I wanted to explore something in global health, but the field was impossibly broad — pandemic preparedness, vaccine equity, maternal mortality, mental health in humanitarian settings. I needed a specific, researchable angle. I began by exploring what other students had already done. I came across a collection of global public health research topics for students that helped me see the landscape. Some projects examined the effectiveness of community health worker programmes in improving vaccination rates, others analysed the role of social media in combating health misinformation, and a few explored the long-term mental health impacts of displacement. That breadth gave me the confidence to focus on something that felt deeply personal: how do cultural beliefs and trust in health systems influence the uptake of malaria prevention interventions among pregnant women in rural Sierra Leone?
I returned to the same region where Mariama had lived, this time not as a volunteer but as a researcher, with ethical approval and a carefully designed set of interview questions. I spoke to women, community elders, health workers, and NGO staff. The conversations were humbling and often heartbreaking. Many women understood that malaria was dangerous, but they also lived in a world where multiple risks competed for their attention — food insecurity, unsafe childbirth, the constant threat of losing a child to diarrhoea or pneumonia. The mosquito net, for some, was simply not the highest priority. Others distrusted the health system because of previous negative experiences, or because the nets were distributed by outsiders who came and went without building lasting relationships. I learned that trust is not a resource you can drop from a helicopter; it must be built slowly, person by person, conversation by conversation. My dissertation argued that global public health interventions must be co-designed with the communities they serve, and that without genuine partnership, even the most scientifically sound interventions can fail. It was a small study, but it honoured Mariama’s memory in the only way I knew how — by trying to understand why things went wrong, and what might be done differently.
If you’re considering a dissertation in global public health, start with a moment that unsettled you — a story you heard, a statistic you couldn’t forget, a person whose face you still see when you close your eyes. The best research questions don’t come from lecture slides. They come from the places where the world’s injustices are most visible, and from a stubborn belief that things can be better. Then explore what other students have already done, and let their work help you shape your own inquiry into something that could contribute, even in a small way, to a healthier, fairer world.