Abilities that will help you succeed? Definitely being resilient, open to learning about new cultures; checking your own biases and making sure you’re not ethnocentric, and you’re very aware of your privilege and your background. You have to be able to laugh. There are lots of times I’m picked on for how I pronounce things, or for how little I still understand about the country even though I’ve been here for six months. Be willing to learn, willing to make friends quickly, and be open to accepting every invitation that comes around.
I did a unique Masters program, that was very applied; it was almost college-like. An example of a class I took was impact evaluation, so learning how to conduct a development project and then learning how to evaluate it so it can be scaled up. So, for example, implementing a new curriculum in rural schools, in only a few areas, and then determining if it worked and you had a good result, and then seeing where it could be a province-wide or nationwide program.
The Canadian government has an incredible internship program. It’s called the International Youth Internship Program, IYIP. It has internships for people under 30, and you only need a college degree or university degree and no prior experience. They will send you to a developing country for six months, and pay for your learning experience. You don’t have to study development or political science or sociology beforehand. They send people who are interested in the environment; they send people who are interested in computer science; they send mathematicians. Everybody has something to offer in development. I think that’s what so unique about the field I work in.
Global Affairs Canada is our big ministry of foreign affairs, trade and development; it’s all amalgamated into one. I did work on the development side when the amalgamation was new. It had a policy section, so I was working on what Canada’s policies, what our stances on development were in international bodies, for example the G7 or the G20. The other side would be our operations and programming, so giving out grants to NGOs, and monitoring them, ensuring they had a gender component and an environmental component, and developing relationships with the NGOs that are on the ground conducting those projects.
At World Vision, which is such a large NGO, there are so many different areas you can become involved in. We work in education, for example, running after school programs. We also work in health where we’re trying to improve sanitation of children in Mongolia; we work with mothers, doing pre-natal classes. We also work on disaster risk reduction, Mongolia is prone to earthquakes, so we get people ready for that, teach how to prepare for that. Or simple things like fire, how to stop, drop and roll. But that’s just programming. We also have accountants, who check all of the books and make sure we’re spending properly; we have procurement officers who find the best companies to work with. And then, we have our strange team working on building relationships with the private sector to get Mongolians helping other Mongolians. We also have communications, so if you’re interested in taking pictures and videos, we need people to capture the essence of our work, and communicate that to donors so they can understand where their money is going. So it’s quite a multifaceted field.
Insights from Dianne Tisdall