Snigdha Arora Wins the Felix Scholarship

Congratulations to Snigdha Arora, a 2024 graduate of Equitech Futures' Civic Tech Institute, on being named a Felix Scholar. The scholarship, which enables outstanding students from India to pursue graduate studies in any subject at one of three partner universities in the United Kingdom, will fund Snigdha's MSc in International Health and Tropical Medicine at the University of Oxford.

Snigdha's path to Oxford was shaped by years of hands-on work in public health. Both before and after her time in the Civic Tech Institute, she partnered with community healthcare workers across rural India, helping strengthen last-mile health delivery in some of the country's most underserved villages. That grassroots experience of working alongside the people closest to the problems has clearly stayed with her.

Reflecting on her time as an Equitech Scholar and her later participation in the Rhodes Forum on Technology & Society, Snigdha expressed interest in how abundance can emerge from the bottom up "when we trust and empower communities to do their own thing and we learn from them." Drawing on her own work with community health workers, she adds that "the best solutions come from those who are closest to the problem," the people best positioned to build something both sustainable and genuinely innovative.

That same conviction is now shaping her graduate studies. Snigdha continues to explore this idea in her coursework, applying lessons from global health systems back to the challenges she's spent years working on at home.

From the Civic Tech Institute to Oxford, Snigdha's journey is a powerful example of what's possible when community-rooted insight meets world-class opportunity. Congratulations, Snigdha!