WDI Global Impact 2015 Insights from Emerging Markets Around the World: Highlights!

By Hester Bentil

From my last blogpost, I promised to tell you more about my wonderful and resourceful friend Eddie Oketta (EO) who currently manages three businesses in Gulu, Northern Uganda. As much as I want to inspire you by telling you his story, I don’t want to miss the opportunity to share some of my significant moments while in Uganda.

As the saying goes, “everything that has a beginning has an end.” All too soon, I am at the tail end of my summer internship. Though challenging, it has been a great learning experience. While in Uganda, I had the opportunity to interact with senior business leaders and influential people, including the Senior Presidential Advisor on African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), Commissioner for External Trade, Ministry of Trade which has been a great leadership development experience for me. You will agree with me that interacting with all these professionals require mental curiosity and the skill of asking intelligent questions while exhibiting high ethical standards. Having the opportunity to interact with these leaders and establishing great relationships has been deeply gratifying.

Let me give you a background into AGOA and Ministry of Trade. AGOA is a non-reciprocal trade preference program that provides duty-free treatment on U.S. imports of certain products from eligible sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries. The Ministry of Trade on its part facilitates trade transactions in Uganda. As part of my field research, I needed to engage with senior leaders of both institutions to gather credible information. Below are some pictures for my repertoire!

Hester and Senior Presidential Adviser of AGOA, Uganda

Hester engaging the team at Ministry of Trade, Uganda

Engaging with the only lady carpenter in Kampala (an entrepreneur currently awarded a Mandela Washington Fellowship for African women leaders to study in the U.S.A, and represented her country on CNN as a woman entrepreneur) has really been a humbling learning experience for me as a woman. With an IT background and deep experience in the creative industry, she spends most of her time teaching and mentoring others as a way of giving back to the community. She is famously known in Uganda for her luxurious high quality furniture and accessories.

Hester and the Entrepreneur

It may seem all fun, but like I did mention earlier, challenging at the same time. One of the challenges had to do with communication gaps which existed due to the language barrier (Nancy Kasvosve, my fellow intern, you are not alone in this). Due to the historical war in Gulu, most of the indigenes had no opportunity to complete their education pursuits, a situation that has partly contributed to their inability to understand and speak English fluently. This made communication with some individuals (other than those in the formal sector) a bit challenging. The worst case always happened anytime I went to the market to shop for food ingredients - I was constantly faced with a communication barrier particularly with impatient sellers, thus spending a greater part of my time on translation. Such a pain!

I didn’t want to end my stay without showing off my WDI-Summer internship cute flag and how athletic I am. I guess, I may be fit enough to compete in the next Olympic Games! As my slogan goes, once an athlete always an athlete!