Alumni webinar #1 Global Research Prize 2025 - Ilhaam Ashraf

Background

This new series of ITM alumni webinars features the four ITM winners of the 2025 Global Research Award. The Global Research Award is presented yearly by the Province of Antwerp to research projects of ‘master-after-master’-students of ITM and other higher education institutes. Development relevance, quality and originality of the master's theses are key in the selection. Through this award, the Province of Antwerp wants to stimulate global research.

In webinar #1, MPH alumna and laureate Ilhaam Ashraf (India) will share insights from her master's thesis, entitled 'From Rhetoric to Reform: Operationalizing Intersectional Health Equity in Primary Health Care Policy. A Scoping Review & Conceptual Framework'. In her thesis, Ilhaam aimed to identify and map strategies that can help operationalise an intersectional health equity lens in primary health care policy designs, through a scoping review. She conducted a structured literature search across PubMed, Web of Science, and Google Scholar, supplemented with hand-searching grey literature and reference tracking. A total of 48 records were included in the final analysis, and a conceptual framework was proposed based on the insights that emerged.

In this webinar, Ilhaam will present the main findings and outcomes of her thesis and discuss her recommendations and conclusion. The Q&A session, moderated by her thesis supervisor John De Maesschalck, will provide an opportunity to answer questions from the audience.