For a long time I’ve dreamed of being a great female activist. Growing up in Uganda, my dad died when I was six and if it wasn’t for a local NGO who supported my education through high school I wouldn’t have made it to where I am now – a final-year student at Makere University. I’ve seen first hand how my mother and my friends’ mothers struggle to feed their families and to send them to school. Of the girls who do make it to university, I’ve been staggered by what parents will sacrifice to pay their daughters’ fees. I work six days a week on top of university to keep my head above water myself.
But I’m one of the lucky ones. I haven’t had to get married. When parents can’t afford their daughters’ fees, a rich family friend offers to pay for the girl’s education on the condition she marries him when she graduates. Many of these girls have no idea this marriage contract was ever discussed, and are suddenly forced into an unhappy marriage upon graduation.
These marriages are very common among my peers, and that’s one of the reasons I want to work in development: to show young women there are other options. But how can I dream of running my own women’s rights NGO in 10 years’ time, when I can’t even get an internship?
Not so long ago I thought local and international NGOs would be keen to snap me up. As a former beneficiary, I know how the aid system works and I’ve witnessed what happens when development programmes don’t reach those in need. International aid agencies are always talking about empowering their local staff and community-led organisations. And here I am – as grassroots as they come and waiting to have my capacity built!
I now know that was naive. I didn’t realise how important connections were or having more significant jobs listed on your CV than “mattress sales assistant” and “room attendant”. However, when I did start applying for work experience, I thought my personal experiences, even if not in formal jobs, would count for something.
This is where my experience and that of other development students around the world conjoin: we’ve all experienced the pain of applying for job after job and being rejected.
But after speaking to an expat woman whose house I clean, I’ve realised this is where the experiences my western peers and I share end. I’ve learned so much about inequality from speaking to the different people who live in the apartment building where I clean rooms, cook, iron and book keep. One particular Indian woman has been incredibly kind to me – she has no development background, but helped me edit my CV and contacted people on a Facebook page for former Columbia University students to see if anyone knew people working at NGOs in Uganda whom I could get in touch with. It was a bittersweet moment as we realised that the introductions we received were only possible because of her Columbia connection.
Actually, the first barrier to getting into development I faced wasn’t my lack of connections. It’s that I don’t have a computer, nor can I access one at my university, despite their requirement that essays are typed. Internet cafes exist but they are not cheap and often not open long enough if you have to work long hours to fund your studies. This is a barrier many in the west wouldn’t even think of. But consider how vital the internet is for job hunting – from Googling CV templates to researching companies to filling in the actual job applications.
If the aid sector is serious about recruiting more young people from my background, NGOs need to pair up with high schools and universities to offer workshops on how to gain experience in this area. My university, despite having an excellent academic reputation, offers no careers advisers, application-writing workshops, recruitment fairs or networking events. I was never taught how to write a CV or told extra-curricular activities were important. The one thing I could highlight on my CV was that I’d presented a radio show about youth empowerment.
Another barrier is more of a concern: how my experience as an intern is so different from people coming from abroad. I hear people in Europe and the US complain about unpaid internships, but my friends and I were asked to pay $45 (£36) for the privilege of interning – a month of my wages.
At the time I accepted this: we were a burden on an NGO in its infancy that desperately needed more funding. But when I see foreigners my age volunteering at Ugandan NGOs, their priorities are different. I’m dependent on this one placement to develop as many new skills as I can, whereas they are more focused on having a good time.
My first internship experience was mixed. I was part of a community outreach team heading out to rural villages to survey households about how well my NGO had met their needs. They were not pleased to see me. It turned out that the NGO sent a group of students every year to survey these people, and they had grown increasingly despondent as little had changed.
My dream of being a development worker didn’t die when I saw this project failing, though. It just made me want to do a better job. So for now I will keep applying for more work experience. However, I also want to see NGOs, schools and universities in my country rethink what type of career outreach they can offer, and not just about bursaries.
The NGO that funded my primary and secondary education invested in me year after year – but they never followed up to see if I graduated from high school and what I did next. Don’t they want to know whether the investment was worth it? Ultimately, the way I see it is that in an increasingly interconnected world, Ugandan students are totally unprepared for navigating the job market, and this benefits no one.
As told to Rachel Banning-Lover
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