"Delterra’s mission is to have lasting and substantial impact on complex social problems, with their first use-case focused on waste management and recycling in developing countries. The organization is currently active in Indonesia and Argentina and my project was for the Argentinian part of the organization, where I helped to design and implement a strategy to scale the learnings of two pilot projects in a resource-efficient way across Argentina. The two pilot projects are very different to maximize learnings, one was aimed at a slum in Buenos Aires (Barrio 31) and the other was for a medium-sized city of 100,000 inhabitants (Olavarria). My activities were split in two main chunks, the first one was to manage and coordinate a structured and structural approach to capture the learnings of the organization during these projects so we could bring all that knowledge to new cities. The second chunk was to support the scaling team in selecting the first cohort of new cities to support and design a plan how to best support them simultaneously. The activities fit well with the mission of Delterra as it helped to scale local impact to national and thus sustainable impact. Delterra is ambitious and wants to expand globally, for which it must showcase that it can expand beyond specific projects first, and my support has definitely contributed to that objective.

The skillsets that I applied most are the soft skills from LEAD, behavioral economics, managerial negotiation, and similar courses. I leveraged how to influence and motivate people to put time and effort into a knowledge codification exercise that most people are not excited to be doing. This required the LEAD leadership definition to be leveraged to its fullest extent in the sense that stressing the importance of the necessity of the exercise to fulfill our mission, expressing gratitude for the invested time and effort, and pushing people to take the exercise seriously stretched the soft-skills I acquired. Simultaneously, one exercise I did was analyze a survey filled in by >50 Argentinian cities with >80 questions of which the main goal was to determine which question(s) were the best predictor of good waste management (as measured in share of waste diverted from landfill). My newly acquired skills from BA and BA2 helped pick the right algorithm and tackle this problem.

Unexpectedly, my biggest challenge was working remotely on an assignment that required a lot of interaction and rapport-building with the teams on the ground, worsened by my inability to speak Spanish. Since my role was for a large part to excite people and ensure they managed to put everything they’d learned on paper, that was more difficult to do without the informal coffee chats. Furthermore, chasing people to do their work becomes less personal when it’s all done through digital communication. Fortunately, we found multiple ways to address the challenge. First of all, I got assigned a team member that was working on the ground, who I could ask to informally chat with some people and see where they stood. Additionally, quick 15-minute planned coffee chats also really helped to get to know the organization better and to talk briefly about some work-related topics as well.

My main goal of this internship was to experience the NGO sector and to contribute to a meaningful mission that addressed climate change and social inequalities. This experience has been wonderful — the dedication of the people I worked with on the challenge they were trying to solve (as opposed to a business opportunity) was very motivating. The culture was very balanced, supportive, and entrepreneurial. At the same time, I experienced how discussions and decisions sometimes became political instead of practical, which occasionally led to a slower decision-making process. Besides that, due to the activities around knowledge codification, I learned a lot about the entire waste management value chain, from source generation to collection, sorting, and sales and across topics of institutional policies, behavioral change, and operations optimization — a very interesting and exciting topic to have more in-depth knowledge about, as it is such an underrated and vital role of society."