Leah Meadows

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Leah Meadows

Country: Indonesia
Organization: Mercy Corps, Agri-Fin Mobile

Leah Meadows was hired for her expertise in gender integration and assessments. While in Jakarta, she researched women’s access to financial services, cellphone technology, and agriculture information. She developed surveys for 160 female and youth farmers, while training local facilitators in how to give 20 focus group discussions in 6 subdistricts of West Java province. She conducted 25 one-on-one interviews and culminated her internship with an office-wide presentation of her 50-page report on how the Agri-Fin mobile project should change to address women’s needs.

Leah: “This internship was truly invaluable. I developed skills that complement my classroom studies, and that will make me more marketable as a working professional. This experience has strengthened my interest in these factions of international development, and I plan to take micro-finance courses next semester to further my career goal.”

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Elena Fiekowsky

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Country: Vietnam

Elana Fiekowsky worked as an impact evaluation specialist at VinaCapital Foundation the summer of 2011. VinaCapital Foundation (VCF) is the corporate foundation for VinaCapital, the largest Vietnamese investment firm. VCF focuses on providing heart surgery to children who would not be able to afford them otherwise, HeartBeat Vietnam, and improving the cardiac healthcare system in Vietnam. VCF also provides a seven year scholarship to ethnic minority girls to ensure that these girls can go finish high school and college, and go on to become role models within their communities’, Brighter Path program.

As an impact evaluation specialist, Elana designed, implemented and analyzed evaluations for their HeartBeat Vietnam and Brighter Path project. To do this work, Elana worked with the program teams to learn what indicators to measure and helped train the team to run and then understand the findings after the evaluations were done. Additionally, Elana helped design program changes in order to increase the rigor and information gathering for these projects.

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