Fumi Tataki

Country: Rwanda
Organization: African Entrepreneur Collective (AEC)

Fumi: "The purpose of my summer internship is to earn an experience of working in Africa to find approaches to achieve economic development through business. By working as a mentor and consultant for clients of African Entrepreneur Collective (AEC) in Rwanda, I developed strong interest in working in human capital development for small medium enterprises (SMEs) in the future.  

After working with SMEs in Rwanda, I started to develop a career interest in human capital development, particularly skill development and change in awareness toward professional environment. I was intrigued by the need of that human capital development that can tremendously make positive impact to development of the country. Besides my work at AEC, I also had a chance to work with AIP, a program that provides training to students. With another Fletcher student, I presented Business Canvas Model to university students across Rwanda. It was a wonderful experience to interact with students and help them develop their own business ideas. After Fletcher, I would like to
pursue my career in SMEs sector to help their business to make development impact to their lives and country’s well being."

Justin Sullivan

Country: Rwanda
Organization: African Entrepreneur Collective (AEC)

Justin travelled to Kigali, Rwanda as a Global Business Mentor for African Entrepreneur Collective (AEC) at Inkomoko, AEC’s pilot program. AEC’s model has already helped create more than 700 jobs, while contributing to the country’s economic and social development.  

Justin: “I found the opportunity to work so closely with young, driven African entrepreneurs incredibly valuable. Not only was I able to refine and put to practice many of the lessons from first year foundational business courses at Fletcher, but I was able to do it a part of the world that I consider a second home, and in a sector that I am truly passionate about and believe will continue to bring a significant social impact to Africa in the future. Honestly, my experience this summer far exceeded my expectations. I am incredibly grateful for the opportunity that the Blakeley Fellowship has given me. With this experience under my belt, I look forward to a long future career in the East African tech business."

Nathaniel Rosenblum

Country: Rwanda
Organization: African Entrepreneur Collective (AEC), Inkomoko

Nathaniel spent the summer working for Inkomoko, a business acceleratory run by the African Entrepreneur Collective (AEC) based in Kigali, Rwanda. AEC through Inkomoko works with hundreds of entrepreneurs in Rwanda to help them move from start up to fully‐fledged business. They are not specialized in a particular field, and rather reflect the growth spaces of the Rwandan economy

Nathaniel: “the most important accomplishment of my time in Rwanda has to do with refocusing my career interest. I am now much more aware of the challenges of financing development in agriculture through the private sector. These challenges are not insurmountable, rather without a concerted effort to deal with them they will continue to hamper ambitious and deserving entrepreneurs. In whatever my next steps are I plan on addressing those problems thanks to this summer’s glimpse into the Rwandan agribusiness landscape.”

Gaspar Rodriguez

Country: Chile
Organization: Corporación La Esperanza (CLE)

Corporación La Esperanza (CLE) offers free outpatient and residential drug rehabilitation services and prevention programs for youth, men, and women in underserved communities across Chile. Seven clinics provide a much- needed lifeline for over 500 patients every year. The goal of Gaspar's internship was to implement a cloud-based solution that allowed them to register and track the most quantitative and key data about their patients. 

Gaspar: “Overall, the internship was a professionally and personally enriching experience. As a native Chilean, I was very excited about working with a local nonprofit and spending time in my home country. I’m very grateful that I was able to apply my background in business development, data architecture, data analysis, and consulting to benefit CLE. My career goals have been, and continue to be, shaped by technology, data, and international development. I hope to use this experience to drive my career of working in the social impact sector abroad. Prior to this, I had never worked in my home country and it was a massive learning experience to understand how the nonprofit and NGO sector is using technology and managing data in Chile. I was also able to meet with and have informational interviews at various organizations that painted a vibrant and rapidly evolving picture of Chile.”

Alexander Kostura

Country: Peru
Organization: AidData Center for Development Policy

Alexander spent the summer serving as an AidData Summer Fellow with the AidData Center for Development Policy. AidData is a research and innovation lab that aims to make development finance data more accessible and actionable. Specifically, AidData collects and analyzes geospatial (or geographic) data to answer the questions: Who is funding what? Where? And to what effect?

Alexander: “My internship with AidData and USAID was an incredibly rewarding experience, for which I am grateful to the Blakeley Foundation. While I did not expect to work with a US government entity, I am glad it was with a USAID Mission abroad because I had the opportunity to interact with multiple NGOs and Peruvian government agencies. This experience reaffirmed my decision to pursue a career with the US Federal government in humanitarian assistance and international development. Previously, I held some hesitation about the impact of USAID. My experiences have taught otherwise. USAID missions are staffed with wonderful people who want to affect change and improve lives. Furthermore, the US government is collaborating with research labs like AidData and creating their own organizations like the USAID GeoCenter in order to innovate and improve their operations. In my career, I hope to be a part of fostering these kinds of partnerships, supporting applications of new technology, and improving international development outcomes."

Catherine Klepacki

Country: Rwanda
Organization: Resonate

Resonate inspires women and girls to become leaders and individual agents of change in their families and communities by teaching them to leverage their personal stories to build confidence and realize their own worth and potential. 

Catherine: "Working with Resonate provided an incredible opportunity to gain experience at the local level in an unfamiliar international context. I learned important lessons about the challenges a small start‐up or NGO may face as this type of organization works to create a sustainable platform for lasting and impactful social change. I gained a unique appreciation for program implementation and evaluation challenges associated with the push by donors and foundations to provide concrete data reflecting a measure of organizational success. These insights impacted how I think about program structure, the importance of clear and measureable goals, and data collection and analysis. The impact of local stakeholder partnerships on organizational success was also clearly demonstrated. Although I learned a great deal from this experience, the opportunity to work in a post‐conflict context with local stakeholders provided greatest personal impact. I am extremely grateful for the Rwandan women with whom I worked who imparted a wealth of wisdom and insight. The opportunity to work with Resonate this summer was extraordinary. Sincere thanks to the Blakeley Foundation for making it possible!"

Kai‐Moritz Keller

Country: Kenya
Organization: Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI)

CHAI was founded in 2002 to help save the lives of millions of people living with HIV/AIDS in the developing world by dramatically scaling up antiretroviral treatment (ART). Kai-Moritz Keller worked within CHAI’s New Initiatives (NI) function on the ‘East African Local Manufacturers’ project.

Kai: “I left Kenya with a solid understanding of what working in an international NGO like CHAI entails and now comprehend the opportunities and limitations of working in a not-for-profit environment. I further solidified my understanding of the different career paths into the field of Global Health and have a clearer understanding of what sort of organization would be a good fit for my background and personality. Furthermore, I understand what it means to work in Eastern Africa as well as the benefits and drawbacks of starting out a career in a resource poor and security wise high-risk environment. Most importantly however, my experience in Kenya fueled my interest in and desire for starting my own public health venture. I left Kenya inspired by all the start-up entrepreneurs I encountered and the opportunities they are pursuing. Working with the different LMs reinforced that inspiration and provided a projection of what a venture might eventually turn into and the reward that building and growing one’s own enterprise entails. I am already exploring and researching opportunities for my own social-impact venture focused on providing access to vital medicine in the most impoverished parts of Africa as well as South-East Asia.”

Robert Helbig

Country: Brazil
Organization: Konrad Adenauer Foundation (KAS)

Robert worked at the Konrad Adenauer Foundation (KAS) in Brazil, a German NGO dedicated to political freedom and economic development. Operating out of Rio de Janeiro and funded by the German Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, KAS has a track record of over four decades of training social entrepreneurs, as well as supporting transparency and socioeconomic development in Brazil. 

Robert: “The time at KAS has been very rewarding for a number of reasons: I learned a lot about project management, stakeholder management and innovation. I was able to improve my Portuguese skills from a basic level to limited working proficiency, so that I can follow my goal to keep focusing on Brazil beyond my time at KAS. Working with my highly experienced colleagues and genuinely kind people, I built a network of professional contacts and strong friendships that will benefit my professional and personal development beyond my time at The Fletcher School.
The time at the Foundation in Rio de Janeiro will have a lasting impact on me, and I also hope that I have become part of the solution to some of Brazil's problems. Of course, a
German NGO can only have a limited impact on the country's development, but I am certain that we are helping to move Brazil into the right direction to become a country of the future. I am deeply grateful for the opportunity that the Blakeley Foundation offered to me - muito obrigado!”

Laura Cuéllar

Country: Colombia & Ecuador
Organization: Ayuda en Acción

Laura worked with Ayuda en Acción (AeA), a Spanish development NGO that has worked for over 30 years in enhancing the welfare of millions of people around the world. Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of AeA is its model: rather than deploying its teams on the ground, AeA identifies local NGOs and supports them financially during an average of twelve to eighteen years. Throughout what it defines as “territorial development,” AeA identifies the community’s most urgent needs –from food security to production and/or commercialization barriers, gender issues, education, and social fragmentation– and designs a long-term integral and panoramic agenda to addresses them. 

Laura:  "Every three years, AeA and its local partners outline the overall development goals and lines of action that will be implemented throughout the upcoming three years in what they call the Triennial Intervention Plan (PIT)1. Each PIT is comprised by between eight to twelve micro- projects, which are the specific development initiatives that will be carried out throughout the triennium2.

During my internship at AeA, I was responsible for analyzing the PITs of Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Paraguay and systematizing the micro-projects that intended to stimulate the community’s local economy. In order to do this, I came up with a series of categories that provided a comprehensive understanding of each micro-project. These categories were: country, Territorial Development Area (ADT)4, local NGO, local NGO code5, micro-project name, micro-project code, description of the micro-project, development goal, path chosen to stimulate the local economy, and analytics6. More often than not, a single micro-project included several analytics and more than one path chosen to stimulate the local economy.  

This internship was my first real-life exposure to development issues. Visiting these communities, talking to community members, witnessing the work of local NGOs, and tying my background in Latin American history to the issues that people are currently facing not only fulfilled me at a personal level, but also reassured me that I want to keep working in the development field after graduating from Fletcher.

Throughout the internship, however, I noticed something that concerned me: the absolute lack of state presence throughout the communities I visited. From schools, to roads, to wells, to everything the communities counted with, had been provided either by NGOs or by the communities themselves. In a way, NGOs such as AeA and its local partners fill voids that states cannot, or do not want to, fill and, hence, have a fundamental role in the wellbeing of these communities. However, there is a limit to what NGOs can do and, unfortunately, their deeds cannot be extended to all poor areas of the countries where they operate.

The oblivion to which states condemn these secluded and impoverished areas is perhaps the main obstacle to their development. In order for long-term self-sufficient economic development to take place, structural changes through which the public sector integrates impoverished regions to the system –for instance through the provision of public services, security, and access to efficient legal and political institutions– are required. Seeking to generate the greatest possible impact in the wellbeing of these communities, this reasoning has, without a doubt, awakened my interest in joining the public sector once I return to Colombia. "

Ashley Anderson

Country: Philippines
Organization: Millenium Challenge Corporation

Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) is a U.S. government agency that provides assistance to support economic growth and poverty reduction in developing countries demonstrating a commitment to just and democratic governance, economic freedom, and investments in people. As the very first summer intern for MCC‐Philippines, Ashley Anderson's main deliverable was to create a repository of social impact reports detailing the specific effects of select MCC programs on beneficiaries and their communities. In order to collect insights for the impact stories, she  arranged interviews with key stakeholders all over the Philippines.

Ashley: “My experience with MCC was a truly enlightening experience both for professional and personal reasons. Professionally, I was able to work overseas for the first time and, more importantly, in a developing context. After seeing the poverty and restraints to economic growth in Manila first hand, I am inspired to find inclusive development opportunities for the Philippines and have decided to focus my thesis on potential growth industries for the country. Furthermore, I now want to explore a career in emerging market entry strategy with a focus on Southeast Asia after I graduate. Finally, I want to express my gratitude for Mr. Blakeley and his family – because of his generosity and investment in Fletcher students I’ve been privileged to have this experience and the potential future opportunities it may lead to..”