Friday, February 1, 2013

Less than a week before departing



A week from today I’ll be in Nigeria; hard to believe.  Feeling anxious about.  Still a lot to do…

What will I do there?  My assignment is to assist an organization called the New Initiative for Social Development (NISD).  NISD’s mission is to establish an avenue through which positive impact towards social and economic development of the society can be made by networking with Government, Private Sectors, and Donor agencies in Nigeria and abroad.  Their specific areas of interest and focus are child and women’s development, human rights, community development, water and sanitation, and education.  I am paired with another IBM’er from India, Sundar Rao, and we had a call with the executive director on Monday.  Overall, they are looking to automate a lot of manual processes (my words).  Specifically, they want help with developing templates for current projects, monitoring and evaluating those projects, and possibly building some kind of database management for planning, policy advocacy, and decision making.  So the scope will become clearer once we get there, but for now these are the general goals.   

Overall, there are 15 IBM’ers that will be in Ado Ekiti, working on 5 projects.  They come from countries all over the world including Brazil, Sweden, Hungary, India, Finland, Costa Rica, Argentina, and the Netherlands.  We’ll all be living together in a local hotel so we’ll get to know each other very well.  

On a side note, this is my first experience blogging.  It’s already been educational just getting to this point.  I plan to add pictures once I get there.  Thanks for reading!   Nigeria #ibmcsc



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