Hannah’s first experience in the field of International Development was right after graduating from high school when she joined a Thai NGO in Bangkok for one year as a volunteer. While working towards her Bachelor’s degree in Political Science at Freie Universität Berlin, Hannah pursued her interest in community development, working with refugee communities in Berlin. 

When joining the Glocal program, Hannah decided to join the program’s gender track. Given this choice, she wanted her internship placement to be in a women’s empowerment program in a post-conflict environment, in order to combine her specialization on Gender and Development with her previous focus on peace and conflict research. Thus, Hannah joined the Nyamirambo Women’s Center (NWC), a Rwandan NGO in the capital, Kigali, focusing on the economic empowerment of local women. Throughout her four months at the NWC, Hannah conducted an evaluation to measure the impact and sustainability of the center’s activities which included interviews and a survey of over 100 (ex-)beneficiaries and their partners and family members, an assessment of the organizational capacity and research on conceptualizations of gender roles in the community. 

Intersectionality theory assumes that each person’s lived experience and individual vulnerability to discrimination is determined by her or his location at the intersection of overlapping social categories. Especially when working in the field of gender and development, it is important to look beyond gendered inequalities and understand how these intersect with other moments of social injustice such as race, class, caste, sexuality, or refugee status in shaping women’s (and men’s) particular experiences of socio-economic, political and cultural marginalization.

 

 

 

 

 

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