When I got to college I was fortunate enough to have some idea of what I wanted to do. I knew after travelling to Nigeria the summer before my junior year of high school that I wanted to study environmental health and sustainable development. My father’s homeland taught me my first public health lesson: our health is inextricably linked to the environment around us. On a car ride with my cousin we found ourselves idling on the dense traffic highways of Lagos and me gasping for air. My cousin did everything in her power to cover my mouth and nose, even telling the driver to roll up the windows in a non-air conditioned car caught in the sizzling heat of a typical Lagos summer. After that experience, and a few high school environmental science courses later, I began to imagine the ways this pollution could affect the health of a population constantly subjected to it. What a degree or career in sustainable development would look like, of course, I had no idea. All I knew was that whatever career I’d end up having, I would want it to be one where I could address harmful conditions that affect people’s health, both domestically and abroad.

Freshman year I enthusiastically declared a major in International Studies, the closest field of study I could find at CUNY that focused on development. I walked into then director Dr. Marina Fernando’s office and told her I wanted to fill out the major declaration form. By spring semester I was already taking on my first international studies internship at a nonprofit called charity: water. This internship was my introduction to the world of water and sanitation, and even larger the world of global health. Suddenly, everything wasn’t about the impact of pollution on our health, but about how having access to basic necessities can dramatically alter our standard of living. What does one do when they learn that over 1 billion people in the world do not have access to clean water, 2.6 billion don’t have access to adequate sanitation, and water-related diseases cause 80% of illness in the developing world? Naturally, I wanted to know why and turned to global health reports distributed by the UN and nonprofits and articles delivered to my inbox by UN Wire—my daily portal into international development. Meanwhile, I began focusing my academic interests on sanitation and water-related illnesses as environmental health issues and was given the opportunity to do so by creating majors in International Environmental Public Health and Human Ecology through CUNY Baccalaureate.

My objective in writing my thesis is for my audience to think about how we can effectively scale up the provision of sanitation in developing countries to combat a public health crisis that has persisted for far too long when the solutions are available.