Finally, I heard back from LSE regarding the condition to attend summer school. And it’s good news, I don’t have to go to summer school as long as I pass my economics course I am currently taking with at least the letter-grade B. That should be easily possible.
That means I will be able to do my internship with the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (link: en / de) for three months from June through September. As usual my planning doesn’t really allow any time between all the ends and starts of things, so I’ll have not even a week after the week in New York to move to Bonn, and I think merely a weekend to move from Bonn to London. Oh well, I chose it like that and I’m really excited about the summer!
Firstly, it’s going to be my first time in New York City. As I’m going as part of my UCU summer course it’s gonna be well-organised. The course is on urban planning and social and economic geography with two of my favourite professor’s here from UCU: Prof. Dr. Jan van Weesep and the Dean Prof. Dr. Rob van der Vaart. After the programme there I’ll have some more days to enjoy the city. Any recommendations as to what I just can’t miss there are more than welcome!
Then, the internship should be very interesting in terms of my professional interests. It’ll give me the great opportunity to be able to look at development issues from yet another angle. While I’ve had quite a lot of experience on the NGO-level through my volunteer work in Japan and East Africa, and while I had interesting insights into the world of an international organisation of the United Nations through my UNDP internship in Sri Lanka, I now have the chance to become acquainted with how government works more directly. That means, to speak in development-terms, having experiences in all three pillars of cooperation (1st pillar or bilateral cooperation, 2nd pillar or multilateral cooperation, and 3rd pillar or civilateral cooperation). The internship is also exciting for me as I will focus on a region that’s quite new to me, the Middle East.
Throughout the last few years, I’ve increasingly realised how effective changes towards sustainable development/growth are only possible with a solid foundation, i.e. supportive government policies, relative political stability; in short, a cooperation-conducive environment that seeks the genuine betterment of society. And that means, government affairs cannot under any circumstances be ignored for development, or, if you want to change something do it from the top-level. In that sense I hope that this upcoming internship will also prove useful for me to see to what extent I can confirm my standpoint, how much of it I should revise, or what there is I might want to dump. I got quite good insights into how a government in a developing country works during my time in Sri Lanka, and how it tackles annoying requests by the UN to do something about this or that, while it happily indulges itself in corruption and nepotism. This German internship, however, will hopefully add something else. First, it’s a Western government, one whose country is infamous for its efficiency and accuracy, and it’ll be intriguing to see whether the same applies when dealing with development cooperation. And second, I have extensively dealt with aid effectiveness during my studies. There would be aid as a national interest or aid conditionalities (think of the United States, where 76% of aid is tied to the purchase of US services and products, see for example here and here)… many interesting things to look at!