Meet Oke Kehinde Oluwatobi

A Cohort 8 alumna of The Next Hundred Public Health Stewards Program, and an environmentalist at heart.

The first time Kehinde applied to The Next Hundred Public Health Stewards Programme, she didn’t get in.

The second time, she almost didn’t apply at all.

Then, in 2023, when a new cohort was announced, a friend who had encouraged her to apply the first time came back with the same advice. Kehinde wasn’t particularly interested. Yet, she submitted the application anyway, almost as an afterthought.

This time, she got selected.

Looking back, she sees that second chance differently. At the time, she was still trying to figure out what she wanted her professional life to look like. She was interested in environmental health. She was also considering global health. She knew she wanted to do work that mattered, but she hadn’t quite figured out where she belonged.

“Getting into TNH-PHS came at the right time because I was still trying to figure out exactly where I wanted to go professionally.”

What followed was a three-day orientation and three-month immersion that changed how she understood public health and, perhaps more importantly, how she understood her own possibilities.

Before TNH-PHS, Kehinde had largely thought about public health through the lens of health. The programme introduced her to a much bigger picture: the environment, economics, technology, project management, consulting and other sectors all shape health outcomes and can create pathways for people working to improve them.

“I felt like I was all over the place. I wanted to do this, then I wanted to do that,” she recalls.

TNH-PHS helped her see that those interests did not necessarily have to compete with one another. They could connect.

Her three-month immersion at SCIDaR made that lesson practical. Beyond the technical work, she learned how to work with people, communicate, manage projects and build professional relationships; skills that have stayed with her well beyond the programme.

But perhaps the most unexpected change was not a technical one.

It was her confidence.

Kehinde describes herself as a shy person. So when she gave one of her first check-in presentations during the immersion, she remembers it vividly.

“It was awful. I was extremely shy.”

At the time, it could have been easy to see the presentation simply as something that went badly. Instead, it became a marker of how much she would change.

With each presentation, assignment and interaction, she became more comfortable speaking, engaging with people and putting her ideas forward. She improved her PowerPoint and communication skills, but more importantly, she became more willing to take up space.

Eventually, she found herself delivering a stakeholder presentation and realised just how far she had come.

“I couldn’t believe that the same person who had started with such a poor and nervous presentation had developed enough confidence to deliver one of my better presentations.”

For Kehinde, that moment mattered because the transformation was visible, not just to her, but to the people around her.

The confidence and practical skills she gained through TNH-PHS have continued to follow her, even as her career has taken her outside the traditional public health space, she doesn’t see that as a departure from everything she learned.

If anything, her experience has reinforced one of the lessons TNH-PHS gave her: public health skills are transferable.

The ability to manage a project, communicate with different people, solve problems, build relationships and understand how different systems connect remains useful wherever she works.

And some of the things she learned through the programme still surprise her.

“Sometimes I find myself thinking, ‘If not for this programme, I don’t think I would have learned some of these things.’”

Her interest in public health itself has remained rooted in something that fascinated her long before TNH-PHS: the environment.

She has always been curious about how water, soil, chemicals and other environmental factors interact with human beings. Combined with her desire to help people, that curiosity naturally drew her towards environmental public health.

TNH-PHS did not necessarily give her a single career path. Instead, it gave her a broader lens through which to understand the paths available to her.

That may be one of the most important lessons of her journey.

Young professionals often feel pressure to have their careers figured out early: to know exactly what they want, choose a path and stay on it. Kehinde’s experience tells a different story.

She applied once and was rejected. She applied again when she wasn’t even particularly interested. She entered the programme still uncertain about her direction. She emerged with new skills, new confidence, a wider understanding of public health and a clearer sense that her career did not have to fit neatly into one box.

Today, she is still learning and exploring how to apply what she gained from TNH-PHS wherever her career takes her.

Her advice to other young people is therefore less about having a perfect plan and more about remaining open to possibility that makes a meaningful difference:

“Be open to learning, be willing to explore, and don’t be afraid if you don’t have everything figured out yet.”

After all, she didn’t have everything figured out when she first applied.

She didn’t even get in.

Sometimes, the opportunity that changes your journey is the one you almost didn’t take.