Paolo D’AprileJournal #1
After the first month of my summer internship at UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), I still get lost in the labyrinths of the Rome building, but I completed my “on boarding” with people, processes and knowledge required to complete my assignment. I have launched the initiatives that I will work on for the next two months. In particular, I am responsible for defining a first business plan for the e-Agriculture initiative, as well as identifying the best practices in Public-Private partnerships in ICT for rural development domain, with particular focus to Sub Saharan Africa.
Entering the FAO building in Rome gives the feeling of leaving Italy every morning; it is located in the very city center, just in front of Circo Massimo, and from the wonderful terrace there is a great view on all the key sights of Rome. Nevertheless, for the Romans it is just a huge white building in the middle of the center populated by expats (Rome is not, generally speaking, an international city); and from the inside you might forget that you are in Italy if it was not for the morning croissants and cappuccino at the bar. The working environment is truly international, and also having already worked for four years in multi-national corporations, the kind of diversity of origins and backgrounds is really striking. Also, due to the regional recruiting targets of the Organization, it was very easy to have my first coffee with a Nepalese nutritionist and brainstorming session with an economist from Uganda. While this diversity might isolate FAO from the city, it is extremely welcoming once you are in. Meeting people from different divisions is relatively easy, and I am taking advantage to understand more about what the FAO does beyond my department and my project. There are almost no MBAs and this creates an interesting and different way of exchanging ideas—i.e. almost “forgetting” about the jargon and the references we are used to.
My work is done inside the KCEF division—which, beyond the thousands of FAO acronyms, aims at Capacity Building and Knowledge Exchange with particular reference to field activities. In particular, in the next two months I should complete two main deliverables: a draft business plan for the e-Agriculture initiative, and a brief with a set of relevant business cases and best practices in PPPs in ICT for rural development. The initiative plan will include an overview of the status of the market, with the identification of key players and relationship with FAO, and a recommendation for a set of initiatives to be launched toward partners and final “customers” (farmers and extension services). The brief will be based on the review of a set of business cases, most probably around mobile telephony and, if possible, focusing on the Africa region. During this first month, I had the opportunity to learn a lot about the activities that have already been done. Also, I participated in sessions with IFAD, another UN agency based in Rome, dealing with agriculture development. Furthermore, we have started defining the key elements of the business plan and a list of potential business cases to be analyzed. Getting some quantitative, measured information and targets will definitely be the key challenge of this project during the next two months.
Journal #2
With two third of my internship complete, I don’t get lost anymore in the huge building. I have familiarized myself with most of my division and with other young professional and interns. I am extremely interested in my work as well.
The initial objective of my internship was two-sided: develop an initiative plan for the e-Agriculture initiative, and conduct a study on Public-Private Partnership (PPP) in ICT for rural development while identifying relevant cases and recommending best practices. The progress and the challenges for the two tasks have been different because the nature of work varied a lot.
During the World Summit on Information Society, FAO volunteered to take the role of facilitator for the action line called “e-Agriculture”, which aims at ensuring the systematic dissemination of information using ICTs in agriculture, animal husbandry, fisheries, forestries and food, in order to provide ready access to comprehensive, up to date and detailed knowledge, particularly in rural areas. My division and my supervisor, in particular, lead the efforts of the e-Agriculture community of practice. Part of my responsibilities was to design the 2010-2011 initiative plan. This included analyzing the market of ICT for rural development (the direct customer of the e-Agriculture initiative), its key stakeholders and potential future partners in the private and public sector and provide with an action plan of initiatives. After some research and conversations with people involved in the field, I drafted a full list of initiatives aiming at increasing community participation, strengthening the partnership with current institutions, creating new relationships and scaling up and mobilizing resources. Next week I will have a complete review of the work done so far, and we will shortlist the proposed initiatives to be further developed.
As far as it concerns the PPP study, it will probably be delayed. After mobilizing most of the communities who worked on the field, I realized that the documentation work is little to not-existent, and some additional work of mapping projects is required.
Journal #3
I chose this internship with the expectations of contributing to the FAO mission, learning more about rural development and capacity building and getting to know UN system culture and people. Looking back at this summer’s work, all of these expectations have been fulfilled, even if the opportunity and the desire to do more are a strong feeling I keep with me.
We completed the 2010 e-Agriculture initiative plan, designing the 10 key initiatives to increase the community participation, strengthen relationship with partners and mobilize resources, so to expand the dissemination of information using ICTs in agriculture. The initiatives span from assessing community needs through survey, to organizing content sharing with leading research institutions and to starting a specific fund-raising campaign. We considered all the resource constraints and built an implementation plan that take into consideration the limited amount of people and funding currently available. As of November, the implementation phase will be launched.
By the end of the internship, I was not only able to orientate myself in the huge FAO building in Rome, but I took advantage of all the formal seminars, informal mentoring, knowledge sharing events in FAO and IFAD in an effort to build up my knowledge on rural development and capacity building. The knowledge and resources available at FAO are incredible. Similarly, it is very easy to have access to trainings also outside the department boundaries through the daily seminars organized by every division (e.g., on impact of climate change on agriculture, food crisis and agricultural marketing). Moreover, I took advantage of the language classes to strengthen my French (useful to interact with West Africa project) through accelerated classes.
Overall, however, what I appreciated most during my internship is the quality and motivation of people working for the organization. Even if my job activity has been mostly individual, I had the opportunity to establish strong personal relationships with other young professionals—each with a very different professional and personal path. Nevertheless, we all shared a common passion and very open to give advice and welcome you in what might seem, at a first sight, a very big and impersonal organization.
