The Acumen Fund is now accepting applications for Acumen Fund Global Fellows Program Class of 2013-2014!

The Acumen Fund is now accepting applications for Acumen Fund Global Fellows Program Class of 2013-2014!

The Acumen Fellowship is a one year program that immerses Fellows in world-class leadership training, field work with social enterprises on the front lines, and a community of changemakers and thought leaders.

DEADLINE: Applications will be accepted until 11:59 PM (Eastern Standard Time) on 16 November 2012.

For more info, go here.

Field Jobs: How to get a job in International Development

Ian Howard today blogged about an interview he did with some names in International Development at University of Toronto. I encourage you to read the whole thing, but I'm particularly quoting the last couple of Q&A's because they have the most relevance to a previous post (Why getting hired by an International NGO is so hard):

Q: Your thoughts on the developing trends in the field of International Development?

[IH] I will talk about two things: what I think you should know and what you want to know.

First, in my opinion you should read at least these books if you are interested in this field:

1. Prahalad – The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid
2. De Soto – The Mystery of Capital
3. Sachs – The End of Poverty
4. Easterly – The White Man's Burden
5. Collier – The Bottom Billion
6. Stiglitz – Globalization and its Discontents
7. you should also listen to the CBC Massey lectures by Steven Lewis on AIDs

Second, now how to get work in this field. This is the classic chicken and the egg problem. You need experience to get the job and you need the job to get experience. Fortunately there are many groups that are there to give you the egg, if you give them your time. Here in Canada we have CUSO, NetCorps, CIDA, IDRC...
type “volunteer international development” and the first link is to CIDA – they have a great page about how to get this experience. Go, be brave spend some time over there. What you will learn will be invaluable so don't worry about not making money it will pay off in time, whether you work in development or not.

Q: Where you see the greatest impacts happening?

[IH] In my opinion the greatest impacts are made when people make long term concerted efforts. Groups like PaM who commit to people for the long haul. These are the stories we don't hear as much about because their work is slow and incremental and is hard to fit into a sound bite or a quick clip.

Q: What advice you would give someone who is just beginning their career in the field now?

[IH] I will share what a wise old man in a dusty rural town in South Western Mali told me, “you come here thinking that you can teach Africa, but in the end it is Africa that teaches you” he was quite right. Do not forget that you have much to learn and that one of the best things that you will do for Africa is to educate your family and friends about it and to take care of your adopted family who you will meet there when you come home.

Why getting hired by an International NGO is hard

I know I've talked a lot about getting field experience. But I've probably not stressed enough that I understand how difficult it is to get field experience, especially in the more difficult areas. While browsing around, I stumbled on Alanna Shaikh's brilliant blog. If you are a regular blog reader or just are interested in this topic, I highly recommend reading her blog. (she's also a bit of an overachieving :-) superstar...speaks four very difficult languages, has worked and lived all over the world, has a graduate degree, and is a happily married mom!!). She's written a great post on the pitfalls of finding good field experience, and how to get past them. You find the whole blog here; I'm quoting a bit of it for taste.

On the topic of "Why you can't get an international job (and what to do about it):"

This is why: when I worked for an international NGO, it cost us $16,000-$20,000 to put an unpaid volunteer in the field. The cost included health insurance, housing, food allowance, and transport costs. Even if a volunteer paid for their own plane ticket, we couldn’t ethically send them to Sudan or Sri Lanka without providing food, housing and health care. Those costs add up fast. For $16,000 in most parts of the world, you can hire a trilingual local person with better skills than any volunteer American. Add to that the possibility that the volunteer will flip out in the new place, and be unable to cope. For an NGO to justify sending you as a volunteer, you need to be skilled enough to be worth the cost and the risk. In other words, trying to be a volunteer isn't really much different from looking for an entry level salaried position. The following advice applies to both paid jobs and volunteer work.

You can make yourself worth the cost of hiring by having the right skills. Luckily for the international job seeker, NGOs are looking for a decent range of skills. The first and most obvious is clinical skills- doctors, nurses, PAs, EMTs, or midwives. They also need finance people - CPAs are great but a budgets and bookkeeping background will suffice. Technical experts on agriculture are very much in demand, as are water and sanitation engineers. Lastly, and this is what most of us get in on, they generally need writers. Any NGO doing development or emergency relief work spends about half their time writing reports on what they already did, applying for grants to do more things, and writing success stories to encourage private donors. They need native English speakers to write this stuff. If you don't have any of the necessary skills, you can gain them. You can train to be an EMT, or find a job where you work with budgets. Writing newsletters or grant applications for your local animal rescue group, neighborhood association, or homeless shelter isn't exactly the same as writing them for an international organization, but it's close enough to get you hired. [...]