The seeds for my journey in the UN were already planted early on in my childhood. When I was in 7^th grade, my father got the opportunity to work with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), upon which we relocated from Tanzania - my country of birth - to Italy. Though young at this time, I was not too young to recognize the stark contrast in living standards between these two countries. I had always been curious about my father’s work in the UN, and so it was to no surprise that a few semesters into my university studies, I found myself inside the UN as well, as I interned for UNAIDS in Ghana, where my family lived at the time. It was all this exposure to different countries and to the global development arena that instilled in me a strong determination to go back home and make a difference.

Championing Inclusive Growth: A Focus on Social Protection and Poverty Reduction

Right after I finished my Master’s Degree, an opportunity to pursue exactly this dream presented itself to me, as I stumbled upon the African Young Women Leaders (AFYWL) Fellowship Programme which is designed to empower a new generation of young African women leaders to play a key role in the design and implementation of development programmes in the context of the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the Agenda 2063 laid out by the African Union. I saw this as the ideal platform to serve not only my country but also my continent, so I took a leap of faith and applied. Fortunately, I was successful. For one year, based in UNDP's Regional Service Centre for Africa in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, I was able to deep-dive into a variety of thematic fields within UNDP’s work on inclusive growth, including poverty metrics, SDG integration, trade, and social protection, setting me up for my current role as an inclusive growth analyst. 

As an Inclusive Growth Analyst, I continue to work with all the above areas, focusing specifically on social protection and multidimensional poverty. While countries across Africa have experienced accelerated economic growth over the last decade, this has not been to the benefit of everyone, with high levels of poverty and inequality continuing to persist. For that reason, our work in the inclusive team is dedicated to ensuring that nobody gets left behind in this trajectory. 

While my work is varied and diverse, it is guided by the dedication to develop solutions that are context specific, rather than importing and prescribing development solutions in a one-size-fits-all manner. Solutions presuppose problems, and therefore, our approach focuses on a deeper investigation of the problems we deem to solve through bottom-up, local approaches. Everybody is probably familiar with universal measures for poverty such as the absolute poverty line. Yet, such metrics often obscure the complexities of poverty. Against this backdrop, the Human Development Report Office (HDRO), UNDP, and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) at the University of Oxford have come up with a new and innovative approach to measure poverty, the annual global Multidimensional Poverty Index, which is published annually since 2010. It measures poverty beyond monetary factors by assessing interlinked deprivations in health, education and standard of living that directly affect a person’s life and wellbeing, using data from more than 100 countries and 1,200 subnational regions. An initiative to measure poverty as a lived experience and tell a story of poverty that is situated, comprehensive, and narrated by those who are most affected by it, the Global Multidimensional Poverty Index has been a milestone in global development.