Location / Country: Kigali, Rwanda
Organization: Africa Entrepreneurship Collective
This summer, I did my summer internship at African Entrepreneur Collective (AEC). AEC is an American NGO which supports entrepreneurs in Rwanda and Tanzania. I would like to contribute more to the beautiful country, Rwanda, as wells as the amazing African continent after graduating from Fletcher.
Read MoreCountry: Mbale District, Uganda
Organization: Discipling for Development (D4D)
Taken together the internship with MCC Indonesia was an enriching one where I had the opportunity to build upon my background in Indonesia and enhance my language skills in addition to learning about a vast array of new sustainable development issues and cultivating field research skills.
Read MoreCountry: Kigali, Rwanda
Organization: Hands of Mothers
Overall, my internship experience with Hands of Mothers (HOM) was extremely rewarding for me. I learned a lot about development at the local level though the lenses of women’s empowerment in business, capacity building, and project sustainability.
Read MoreCountry: Zimbabwe
Organization: TechnoServe
My summer experience as a Blakeley Fellow working with TechnoServe and the African Agriculture Fund (AAF) was nothing less than a “have-it-all-at-once” opportunity. In my ten weeks in Zimbabwe, I was afforded the chance to delve deep into each of my interest areas – small and medium enterprise development, private equity, business strategy and impact investing.
Read MoreDRISTY: "BRAC is the world’s largest non-governmental development organization measured by the number of employees and the number of people it has helped. It is dedicated to empowering people and communities living in poverty, illiteracy, disease and social injustice through its various programs in areas ranging from microfinance, agriculture and food security, education and more. It currently operates in 11 countries across the globe
Read MoreNASHWA: GSMA1, working with a wide range of mobile network operators and civil society organisations, is launching a series of nutrition-focused m-health and m-agriculture initiatives in South Asia and sub- Saharan Africa, called mNutrition. The objective of mNutrition in mAgri is to create and scale commercially sustainable mobile services enabling smallholder farmers to improve their nutrition, yields and incomes. The product to be delivered and evaluated is the Vodafone Farmers’ Club. The service is a bundled solution offering agricultural information in addition to voice and SMS services. In order to measure the causal impact of the Farmers’ Club product, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) will conduct an external impact evaluation of the mAgri programme in Ghana in November 2016. A randomized encouragement design will be implemented. Specifically, some communities will be randomly assigned to receive additional marketing and promotion of the Farmers’ Club product and some communities will not be assigned to the additional marketing and promotion. The additional marketing and promotion will consist of price discounts, advertisement scripts, and gender targeting.
Rationale for Intervention
The rapid expansion of mobile phone access to populations at the base of the income pyramid presents an unprecedented opportunity to expand coverage of nutrition and agriculture services to this previously overlooked segment of the mobile market. Mobile phones and computer centers are the most targeted channels to provide not only technical and scientific information on crop production and nutrition, but also to support the marketing of products that can help level the playing field between small producers and traders. Agricultural extension services delivered via mobile phones can in theory promote ‘nutrition-sensitive’ interventions by creating competent and efficient farmers who are able to increase productivity by making effective use of knowledge and information which is delivered to them.
Broadly speaking, nutrition-sensitive agriculture is aimed at improving the nutritional status of a population by maximizing the impact of food and of agricultural systems, while minimizing the potential for negative externalities regarding the sector’s economic and production-driven goals. In the last few years there has been a visible trend in agricultural policies and programs to become ‘nutrition-sensitive’ by leveraging agriculture to maximize nutrition impact. Yet there is an identified need to better understand the linkages between agriculture and nutrition, and to decipher the ways in which agriculture can contribute to improved nutrition. Despite the potential of mobile services coupled with agricultural change to improve nutrition and diet quality, very few studies exist that critically assess the application of mobile phone technology for nutrition in resource-poor settings.
Farmers’ Club
Farmers’ Club is a bundled solution offering farmers agricultural and nutrition information in addition to voice and SMS services. The target market Vodafone expects to attract is about 450,000 Farmer Club users by 2016/17 across 8 regions in Ghana: Eastern Region, Western Region, Ashanti Region, Central Region, Northern Region, Volta, Brong-Ahafo, and Greater Accra. Researchers from the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) are conducting a rigorous mixed-methods evaluation to estimate the impact of mNutrition and to understand how the context and the components of the mNutrition intervention shape its impact. To estimate the casual impacts of the product on farmer’s behavior, knowledge, nutrition, yields and income, a randomized encouragement design is being implemented where some communities are randomly assigned to receive additional marketing and promotion of the Farmers’ Club product and some are not assigned to the additional marketing and promotion. The additional marketing and promotion will consist of price discounts, advertisement scripts, and gender targeting.
The goal of the impact evaluation is to measure the causal impact of Farmers’ club on behaviors and outcomes linked to nutrition and agriculture. But before a full scale impact evaluation is rolled out; which is resource and time intensive IFPRI decided to do a pilot, which is the leg of the project that I was brought on to do. Essentially the purpose of the pilot was to test the assumptions of the evaluation and related encouragements before they are rolled out for the study and to test willingness to pay for the Farmer club product. As soon as I landed in Ghana I had three priority areas to work on:
Build relationships with potential implementing partners and all the involved stakeholders; including Vodafone, The University of Ghana, and ESOKO2
Collaborate with Vodafone to do user feedback surveys for existing Farmers’ Club customers. This would help the research team at IFPRI understand the rates of take-up of the service as well as the perceived benefits of subscribing.
Set up the IRB3 protocol, as well as pilot evaluation that would allow us to answer the following research questions:
How effective is the Farmer Club at increasing the knowledge and changing the behavior of farmers?
What are the impacts and cost-effectiveness of the Farmer Club product on household’s dietary diversity, agricultural income, and production?
Does targeting women increase impacts over and beyond the impacts of a non-targeted Farmer Club product?
What is farmer’s willingness to pay for Farmer’s club?
The preliminary data gathered while I was in Ghana evidenced that Farmers’ Club positively enhanced the livelihoods and quality of life of smallholder farmers by improving access to information, financial services and supply chain solutions, delivered via mobile phone. Furthermore the mNutrition component of the intervention promoted behaviour change around key farming decisions and practices via mobile nutrition content.
Mark worked with a young but promising social-enterprise in Rwanda’s growing Agri-business sector. Located in Musanze District, Northern Rwanda, Zamura Feeds LTD operates in the commercial livestock feed industry.
Read MoreLauren accepted an offer as a Humanitarian Assistance Fellow with Project Concern International (PCI) in Zomba, Malawi
Read MoreParoma spent almost three months working with the Microfinance programme of BRAC in Uganda. BRAC is an NGO that started as a small post-war rehabilitation operation in the newly born Bangladesh in 1972, and grew to be one of the largest NGOs in the world.
Read MoreAnanth's internship was with the Vulnerability Analysis and Mapping (VAM) unit in Khartoum, Sudan. VAM collects and analyses data from thousands of households every year – particularly in rural, poor and food insecure populations – to provide WFP program managers and the broader humanitarian community with information, analysis and advice.
Read MoreFumi: "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.
Read MoreJustin 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.
Read MoreNathaniel 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
Read MoreResonate 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.
Read MoreBraden Weinstock’s consulting project was with Endeavor South Africa. Endeavor is a leading non-profit accelerator with offices in about 20 emerging markets. He had three objectives for his summer experience – to learn about South Africa, to test his skills at supporting entrepreneurs, and to develop himself as a leader.
Braden: “My experience in South Africa was very enriching on both perofessional and personal fronts. Professionally, working in a non-profit I got to experience the culture and struggles which are both very different from a Fortune 500 firm. On a personal front, I learned I would love living in South Africa, and am pursuing career opportunities there now.”
Read MoreOwen M. Sanderson worked in one of the fastest-crowing tech centers in the world: Nairobi, Kenya. He focused his summer on two objectives: supporting Ushahidi’s business development team as they think through their current business model and conducting several in-depth training seminars for a small cohort of young African entrepreneurs at Nairobi’s celebrated iHub.
Owen: “After two months in East Africa, I left feeling every optimistic about its future. I embarked upon my summer with the goal of investigating the unique link between technology and development. My summer in Nairobi underscored the widespread allure of technology and its potential to uplift millions.”
Read MoreHeather Lemunyon’s role at AEC (The African Entrepreneur Collective) was to serve as a Global Business Mentor, or and entrepreneurship consultant who worked one-on 0one with AEC’s clients in business planning financial planning, developing strategies for growth, market and sales analysis, and and strategic vision.
Heather: “In every way possible, my time as a Global Business Mentor with AEC was outstanding. Not only did I fulfill all of my personal goals for my internship experience, I was allowed great opportunities to directly and positively impact the growth of East African companies that I hope will continue to grow, increase employment, and continue to develop this region of the world with such large opportunities and potential.”
Read MoreManisha Basnet worked as an Economic Consultant for FIT Uganda. The eight week project involved field research on market information system, cost-benefit analysis and market trend analysis of agricultural commodities.
Read MoreAnisha Baghudana completed a research fellowship with the MasterCard Center for Inclusive Growth and Institute of Business in the Global Context (IBGC) at the Fletcher School. MasterCard and IBGC piloted a new initiative for Fletcher graduate students this year to support original research touching upon the themes of private sector innovation to promote inclusive development in emerging and frontier markets.
Anisha: “I am indebted to the Blakeley Foundation for providing me the opportunity to pursue my career interests and am hugely thankful to Jerry Blakeley for giving me the flexibility to do a research project instead of a traditional internship”
Read MoreJennie Vader began her internship with Vera Solutions by designing and conducting two assessments of the company’s overall effectiveness and client satisfaction. She contributed to blog posts, information templates, and provided internal knowledge of DM&E processes. She also had the opportunity to assist on a client project, developing theory of change, indicators and assessment tools for Generation Citizen, a nonprofit dedicated to introducing action citizenship into US schools.
Jennie: “I learned so much more than technical skills; I learned a lot about myself, the state of the field, and where I want to head on my career path! Thank you so much for this unique opportunity and for continuing to support Fletcher student. We appreciate all you do!”
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