Biography | Kirsten Schuijt — The Tongersestraat Faculty Where She Took International Economics

People treat a WWF director general as a product of Swiss headquarters and Dutch campaign offices.

The economics degree that precedes her field years was taken in this former Jesuit house on Tongersestraat.

Kirsten Diane Schuijt was born in February 1974.

Geneva Solutions records her as a Haarlem native who grew up between North Holland, Denmark and Germany.

Inequality, not a laboratory bench, is what sent her to Maastricht University's School of Business and Economics.

The faculty still occupies the Canisianum at Tongersestraat 53, a listed complex whose coach gate and reused Vilain XIIII facade face the street.

She took a master's in International Economics here.

By a later WWF-Netherlands interview, she was almost finished with that degree when she wrote to Dutch embassies across Africa asking for a placement.

The letter that landed was Nairobi's.

Geneva Solutions dates the East African wetland years to age twenty, first on the Uganda-Kenya border and then in Malawi.

If the February 1974 birth month is right, that first season falls in 1994.

The work was not a short visit.

She spent those years with communities that drew drinking water, house clay and roofing reed from the same marshes.

That problem — how a wetland pays for itself in local hands — became the line she later took to a PhD in Environmental Sciences at Erasmus University Rotterdam.

In April 2005 Ecological Economics published her paper on the costs of wetland degradation for African communities, under the name Kirsten D. Schuyt.

Stand on Tongersestraat and the sequence is visible: a Dutch economics classroom, then a lake-edge marsh, then the conservation jobs that followed.

The building in front of you is still the School of Business and Economics.

Photo: Kleon3, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons