Week One in Washington!

I began my first week with a full day of orientation at the State Department – filled with standard administration sessions, motivational speeches about working for the Department of State’s foreign and civil service, and stories of past intern blogs gone bad. Not that I was planning on it, but you won’t find any classified or sensitive information here this summer.

I have to admit, getting back to work in an office proved more difficult than I imagined. Peace Corps and a year of grad school have kept me out of offices for almost five years! However, by the end of the week, there was so much to do and so many events and meetings to attend, the eight hour work day didn’t seem long enough. (I will admit, one of the highlights was running around the National Mall during lunch, something I hope to continue during the summer.)

My first assignment is to assist the Program Officer for Central Africa (Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, Republic of the Congo, Burundi, Tanzania, Rwanda, Cameroon, Gabon) review NGO proposal submissions for refugee assistance in the DRC, Burundi, and Tanzania. The call for proposals specifically requests projects in the following target sectors: shelter, health/mental health, water and sanitation, livelihood promotion, primary education, and gender based violence (GBV) prevention and response and proposals are accepted for projects ranging from $250,000 to $1,500,000.

I am learning quite a bit about the proposal process. From policy creation and Congressional funding approval for the activities within each region, to the posting of requests for proposals (RFPs) for one-year refugee assistance projects that meet the policy goals for the individual countries, to the review by committee of each of the submitted proposals…. being actively engaged in the process of reviewing proposals is quite a change from being on the ground implementing the projects; however, within the first week of my internship I already started to understand more about the seemingly disparate link I viewed in the field between policy making and grass-roots implementation. Not only is it more connected, but there is extensive field and regional knowledge at the policy level.

While I reviewed the proposals, I felt myself particularly focused on the following three areas:

Gender mainstreaming

In April, I organized a Gender Mainstreaming workshop in conjunction with the International Development and Gender Professional Interest Committee (IDG/PIC) and Bridge Builders Conference. One of the biggest takeaways from the workshop was that gender needs to be integrated into all aspects of projects from the inception, not solely as an afterthought or add-on. Therefore, I looked at the proposals with a highly gendered lens, and questioned how the project could or would impact males and females, for example:

- Will after school activities effectively target both girls and boys?
- What percentage of girls will attend school? Women will attend a training?
- How many women will be targeted for business development projects?
- Will shelter and latrine structures give women and girls enough privacy and protection?
- Is information disseminated in a way that will reach both males and females equally? (For example, if it is written literature, what is the literacy rate for men and women? If it is at a community gathering, will women attend?)
- Will women have a voice at the decision making table?

Livelihoods

It took me almost two years as a Peace Corps Volunteer of living in a community and understanding the culture and language to figure out how to effectively work with business development in my community. So I was on the lookout for income generating projects that:

- Included extensive business skills training in a culturally and technically appropriate manner
- Gave women access to income generating activities that would generate sufficient revenue (For example, will a soap-making cooperative generate the same revenue as a car mechanic cooperative?)
- Created opportunities that would have sustainable market linkages

Gender-based violence (GBV)

I will be working more extensively with exclusive GBV programs this summer; however, GBV prevention and response was a sector targeted in the proposals I reviewed, so I have started to learn more about the sexual and gender based violence that is especially prominent in conflict and humanitarian situations. For example, environmental degradation can increase incidents of sexual violence if women and girls have to seek firewood further and further away from refugee camps increasing their vulnerability. I have also learned about the cultural stigmatization associated with GBV – women who are left by their husbands after being sexually assaulted or men who are victimized. The programmatic response to GBV, which includes sexual assault, rape, and domestic violence, must be multifaceted.

On that positive note, I’ll leave you until next week.