BY CHLOE ADCOCK
Chloe Adcock is a second-year IDEV student who interned at USAID during the summer of 2020.
Perspectives: Where did you intern this summer?
CA: I interned at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in the Bureau for Africa, specifically within the Youth and Education Division as part of a team that runs a continent-wide program called the Young African Leaders Initiative (YALI).
Perspectives: How did you find this internship, and what was the hiring process?
CA: I found this internship through USAID’s website. I just sent in my resume and cover letter to an email address; it wasn’t through USAJobs. Then I had a phone interview.
Perspectives: What were your primary responsibilities? Please describe the projects you worked on.
CA: YALI is a leadership development program for business, civil society, and public sector leaders aged 20 to 35 in Africa, and participants come from all fifty-four countries on the continent. My main scope of work was helping with the communications and partnerships work. For communications, I developed a storytelling template to standardize the way the program does storytelling work and made sure we were consistently asking questions that stakeholders, like the U.S. government and private sector funders, wanted to know about. I then used my template to interview eight program alumni who had participated in YALI to write impact stories.
The YALI program is a public-private partnership and gets funding from foundations and corporate partners, so partnership building is another important component for the sustainability of the program. To that end, I helped plan an event that will hopefully be held sometime in 2021 to bring together private sector partners and program alumni, so that alumni can make connections for their businesses and organizations and YALI can build partnerships.
Perspectives: Was there previous coursework or work experience that you found especially useful during the internship or the application process?
CA: I found the Principles of Evaluation and Practical Research Methods classes to be useful with communications work. Although I was not undertaking actual research or an impact evaluation, the storytelling work is used to document impacts for U.S. government reporting and for potential private sector sponsors. I referred to some of the readings about qualitative research from my classes.
Perspectives: What were some of your key takeaways from this internship for your academic and professional interests?
CA: One big takeaway for me is how important confidence and a sense of self-efficacy and purpose are. A common theme from people who participate in YALI is that right after they do the program, they launch a business, or they start an NGO, or they start getting promoted at work. We’re in a moment right now as a sector where people are speaking louder about power inequalities in development and the problem with Western aid institutions coming in and dispensing development advice. I think YALI’s approach is much more equitable in that sense because it empowers young people to go on and make the changes they want to see in their communities.
Another takeaway was about breadth versus depth. YALI is unique compared to many of the social development programs I’ve learned about in SAIS because it’s deep and holistic. The training is full-time and lasts between four to six weeks, partially online but also with a residential aspect, and the huge time commitment really makes a lasting impact on the people who participate. A lot of focus these days is on reaching the greatest number of people possible and scaling things, but I think broad and shallow isn’t always better.
The last big takeaway for me was framing Africa’s large youth demographic in a positive light. Some of the rhetoric in international development or international security circles calls the “youth bulge” a threat to security or resources. I don’t like the idea of referring to an entire generation of people as a burden or a challenge to be dealt with, and my department at USAID talked about youth and development as an opportunity, which was refreshing.
Perspectives: What should future SAIS students interested in this internship know?
CA: This internship—at the headquarters of USAID in the Bureau for Africa—is great for students who are interested in working on African affairs in the future or aspiring development practitioners who want to get a taste of what working for this particular agency is like. However, it is important to realize that the headquarters work is more bureaucratic and removed from on-the-ground program implementation. Another thing to keep in mind is that the institution is so vast that your experience may vary a lot depending on your team.
PHOTO CREDIT: Tom Page, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic