Miran Song

Location / Country: Mbale District, Uganda
Organization: Discipling for Development (D4D)

SONG: "As a Blakeley fellow this past summer, I had the incredible opportunity to travel to Mbale District in Uganda as a research intern with Discipling for Development (D4D), a department of The Navigators, an internationally recognized NGO. D4D is a community-based development organization focusing on empowering people in rural villages with sustainable knowledge and skills. Their mission is to help community people grow in their ability to solve their own problems in various aspects of their lives. As a catalyst for development, they assist the community people in identifying the resources they don’t realize that they have and building on those resources for improving their lives. Their approach is unique and sustainable in that it helps people stand on their own feet by taking ownership of the resources, knowledge, and skills that they identify themselves.”

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Internship Goals

“My main goal that I wanted to achieve during my internship was to experience first-hand how sustainable development is being lived out in rural Uganda and to help the D4D team document impact through my research. Other goals included:

• To learn about Ugandan and East African culture

• To actively engage in the communities with development perspective

• To observe how D4D transforms communities

• To document the impact of the D4D projects with a focus on how women in the communities have been empowered by D4D

• To hone facilitation/leadership skills ”

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Responsibilities & Accomplishments

“For the first half of my internship with D4D, I was given the chance to give workshops on the phases of a D4D program to the staff and visitors. The five phases of a D4D program (preparation phase, exploration phase, mobilization phase, empowerment phase, and reproduction phase) have been the foundation for the work of D4D community development. Learning about the phases and teaching on them myself was a good learning opportunity to get a better understanding of the organizational vision and values and enhance my facilitation/leadership skills. I also could learn more deeply about the work of D4D through attending community workshops, trainings, and project follow-up meetings in the villages.

For the second half of my internship, as a research intern, my main task was to do an impact study/research on how poverty has been alleviated and lives have improved in the communities that D4D has been working with. The research was conducted mainly through formal and informal individual interviews and group discussions over the period of one month. Through my research, I was able to get a vivid picture of how the people in the rural villages have been transformed and impacted holistically by D4D over the past three decades. My research focused on areas of environment, agriculture, and health, with a focus on women’s empowerment. “

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Conclusion

“Overall, my internship with D4D was a very rewarding and enriching experience that changed my view of development. Professionally, my experience working with Ugandan locals for 10 weeks dramatically changed my narrow, pre-conceived notion of what development truly means to local beneficiaries, thus helping me refine my definition of development. And through my encounters and interviews with local people in Mbale, I made the conclusion that health issues in Uganda and other Sub-Saharan African countries are what I want to devote my future career to and where my passion lies. Personally, I feel privileged to have been able to develop meaningful relationships with the staff and local people in the villages. I still have much more to learn, but I am sincerely thankful that I got a glimpse into what it means to put myself in those people’s shoes that I am trying to help. I am beyond grateful to the Blakeley Foundation for this incredible, life- changing opportunity that I had this past summer!”

Paroma Husain

Country: Uganda
Organization: BRAC Uganda

PAROMA: "During the last summer I 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. BRAC now operates in 12 different countries across Asia and Africa; taking its years of experience from Bangladesh in implementing successful models in various development programs such as health, education, microfinance, and community empowerment into other developing countries.

Uganda is BRAC’s largest and fastest growing operation in Africa. In the last decade, Uganda has grown consistently, at an average rate of 6.4 per cent. It has made significant progress towards meeting the Millennium Development Goals and is now focusing on achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. But approximately 20 per cent of Ugandans still live below the poverty line and they are mostly concentrated in rural areas. While there are a number of financial institutions providing financial services to marginalised groups, they have limited operations in rural areas. With 147 branches all over Uganda and more than 180,000 borrowers served, BRAC Uganda’s microfinance program is one of the biggest in the country and it reaches out to the poorest in both urban and rural areas.1 Besides microfinance, BRAC currently operates programs in small enterprise, agriculture, poultry and livestock, health, education, youth empowerment, adolescent livelihood, and the Karamoja Initiative in Uganda. To date the programs have served 4.4 million people, which is almost 12% of Uganda’s population.2 Before Fletcher, I have been working in BRAC’s microfinance program in Bangladesh. This summer I had the wonderful opportunity to work with and learn from my colleagues in Uganda."

"My three years of experience with BRAC Bangladesh had made me curious to find out how well BRAC can apply its learnings and program models from Bangladesh in a starkly different country context. Working with BRAC Uganda gave me an opportunity to assess the success and failure of BRAC’s international scaling efforts. My overall conclusion is that while there are some things BRAC is doing quite well in its country offices, it can do a much better job in many other aspects. For instance, there is a clear cultural divide between Bangladeshi expats, who generally occupy higher management posts, and the local staff. While the highly standardised operational models were so crucial in BRAC’s amazing success story of scaling in Bangladesh, strict compliance of these standards can overlook the contextual operational needs in a different country. There is also a resource constrain in the mostly donor-depended programs of BRAC International that BRAC Bangladesh does not have to face. As a result,

many effective client oriented programs and monitoring tools that have proven to be effective in Bangladesh cannot be implemented in other BRAC countries. Based on several of these observations, I can make the following recommendations: (The suggestions made in this section are mostly based on interviews with clients and staff members and observations from field visits – which are often anecdotal and not grounded in rigorous studies.)"

Manisha Basnet

Country: Uganda

Organization: FIT Uganda

Manisha 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.

Manisha: “This internship has helped spur my interest in strategic management consulting. It has also helped reinforce my interest in financial inclusion as a tool for social and economic development.”

Dhriti Bhatta

Country: Uganda
Organization: FIT-Uganda Pvt. Ltd: an agro-consulting firm in Kampala

Dhriti Bhatta worked as a member of the consulting team at FIT, developing a rollout strategy for FIT’s latest product, FARMIS (Farmer’s Record Management System). She conducted value chain analysis for the coffee sub-sector, wrote proposals for consultancy projects, and conducted analysis for FIT’s trademark product, the Market Analysis Report (MAR) 2013, a comprehensive collection of price information of over 40 commodities from over 35 markets in Uganda.

Dhriti: “This experience was important for me, as I got a a sense of how rural Uganda still is and how difficult it is to operate businesses there. I was pleasantly surprised by the farmers’ groups we came across there. The leaders of these organizations seemed quite entrepreneurial and were excited to test out a product like FARMIS. Overall, my experience in FIT Uganda was quite important to my academic and intellectual interests. I learnt a lot more about how the agriculture sector works, specifically in East Africa. Also visiting a growing East African country gave me a sense of how those markets are expanding and increasingly becoming more important globally.”

Kyle Muther

Country: Indonesia and Uganda
Organization: Mercy Corps

Kyle Muther conducted a value chain analysis of four selected commodities in Uganda and Indonesia to identify market opportunities for bundling farm and crop management tools and financial services on mobile platforms. He attended meetings of the Indonesia World Economic Forum working group on Maize.

Kyle: “The internship was very useful for my career development… with a lot of interaction with high level MercyCorps staff. My main accomplishment during the summer was getting exposure to an exciting field – mobile agriculture information services and mobile money/banking.”

Bernardo Goriupp

Country: Uganda

Organization: MAPLE (Microdevelopment for the Alleviation of Poverty through Learning and Entrepreneurship), an Oregon based NGO operating in Uganda

Bernardo Goriupp worked as Project Manager, responsible for design to implementation of a small scale fish farm. This included everything from technical and business modeling to investigating potential sources of funding to developing a business plan to be used for grant applications and for expansion.

“What makes me proud is that I left behind something that did not exist before… it may well be one the the things of greatest significance I have ever done. The whole experience was also very useful in serving my own careet objectives. I have a profound interest in the synergies between development objectives and business, in particular the role that the private sector can undertake to promote sustainable and long-lasting social progress.”

— Bernardo

Michelle

Country: Uganda

Michelle worked with two Kiva microfinance partners, BRAC Uganda and Pearl Microfinance Limited. Her goal as a Fellow was to ensure that each institution accurately represented Kiva and was utilizing Kiva funds efficiently. She saw how Kiva’s mission came together in the field and had significant involvement with top management at both MFIs.

The Fellowship reiterated my previously held belief that microfinance alone cannot solve problems in development, and that access to health systems, education, and good governance among other things, is needed for change to be sustainable.

Christine / Andrew

Country: Tanzania

Christine assisted Twaweza, a Tanzanian based NGO with operations in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, to prepare an evaluation plan and research existing data for a baseline survey. Designed a way to use cellular SMS to conduct surveys and designed a reporting system to report violence in a timely manner.

Andrew focused for CARE in remote villages where there had been no previous NGO intervention and limited government presence to develop a baseline survey, platform monitoring future progress and building local commerce.

Rebecca

Country: Uganda

Rebecca conducted focus group discussions and designed a program manual for Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), designed survey tools oversaw a pilot program in 8 schools. She also managed relationships with all partners on Google’s Social Impact Assessment including development of a study guideline and manual for marketing teams.