To which extent has your passport influenced your career trajectory?
As a holder of a Swiss passport, I have been lucky throughout my career to get jobs and travel in different countries in the world without major administrative hurdles. I am fully aware of that privilege, having worked for years in the migration and refugee field where I have seen firsthand how harsh the study and work realities for non-European or non-US citizens can be.
In today's edition I want to shed light on this particular aspect and its relevance for the philanthropy world. What does it mean to apply for a job in a philanthropic foundation for which a visa sponsorship is required? If you have all the requirements (and maybe beyond) except for the right passport? What does it mean for philanthropic foundations who on paper aim to become more inclusive and closer to their ultimate beneficiary group but struggle with national legislation and have limited internal resources to tackle this?
To dig deeper into these issues, I have spoken with Joyce Rafla, Ed.M. a mid-career woman from the Middle East, with extensive experience in ECD, evidence-based programming, impact measurement and policy work. Having worked for NYU Global TIES for Children and Egypt’s current President (Al-Sisi), she is fully committed in continuing her career path in the evidence-driven programming sector in ECD and has applied to and been headhunted for several positions where she's well qualified. As it seems, visa sponsorship can be a discriminating factor that is often overseen in the philanthropic job world. I hope these insights will strengthen our nuanced understanding of what decolonializing aid in practical terms means.
Dear Joyce, thank you so much for your openness and interest in our exchange. First, I think it would be great if you could share a bit about your background and what led you actually to this whole education and philanthropy world.
When I graduated, I was highly motivated to work in education. That’s because I saw how education made a difference in my personal journey.
For most of my life I attended Egyptian public schools. And then I went to the American university in Cairo (AUC) which is a private institution. That shift was huge because AUC prides itself on strengthening critical and philosophical thinking. I remember the first time I had to sit down and write an essay. I was taking a philosophical psychology class called “Good and Evil Across Cultures and time”. The professor asked us to write an essay on what we think is good and evil without using any religious references. I sat for two hours in front of an empty word document, and I was completely lost. I didn’t know how to reference anything that's not religion. And I also didn’t know how to write an argument. This was the moment where I started my journey, realizing how education - and not just rote memorization - is very important and gives you insights. It can open your eyes to what’s wrong in the world and once you see it, you cannot un-see it. While it comes with a little bit of a burden, it also offers you depth of perspective. So, by then I knew that education was my thing. I wanted to transform lives with education, which showed how young I was!
My journey has been marked with pursing answers that only led to more questions. I started working in a corporate company in Egypt for three years. And I tried to get into the corporate responsibility sphere to see how the private sector can help improve education. However, I soon realized that the private sector cannot help if profitability is its main objective. Any CSR initiatives will have to tie back to their brand and their size. That’s where I realized that I was going to study education and do something in that field. I applied, got a scholarship and went to Columbia University to do a Master's in Human Development to deeply understand how kids develop.
I used that opportunity to learn as much as possible about education reform, in particular the history of education reform in Egypt. When I came back from my Master's I was lucky enough to work in multitude of education projects in Egypt. I worked on a USAID project called Education Support Program and I was chosen to sit on a council that reports to the president of Egypt. We used to meet regularly with the President Sisi and talk about education, which got me great policy exposure. At the same time, I was also supporting teachers as I was teaching young women in public schools. This led me to see different angles of education in Egypt, all at once.
Over time I became more interested in impact evaluations. I didn't know what they were called at that time, but I was immediately fascinated by their advantages. I realized that you could actually have some guidance of what works and under what circumstances instead of just walking in the dark and be like, “I hope this works, but I'm not sure it does”. This led me to another Master’s study. Thankfully, I was very lucky, and I went to Harvard through a scholarship with a focus on language and literacy. I took a lot of statistics classes to learn more about how impact evaluations work. When I graduated, a position opened at New York University's Global TIES for Children where their bread and butter is impact evaluation and policy research.
So, I got a job there and I worked on three different projects (EQUAL, Ahlan Simsim and QITABI). EQUAL was a research network for early college scholars in sub-Saharan Africa and Arabic speaking countries, for which I directed the Arabic speaking countries’ chapter. And we found and funded a lot of scholars that are working on SDG 4. Ahlan Simsim was a larger project, it was serving all Syrian refugees in the Syrian response region. I led an impact evaluation of the parenting program that was delivered over the phone.
And the third project was QITABI; which focused on serving all public primary schools in Lebanon. They wanted to do an impact evaluation, but we didn't have the prerequisites for an impact evaluation. So, we became very creative with the research tools we have and the data we have to come up with participatory monitoring and evaluation models, in a decentralized way. This allowed me to put my newly acquired anti-colonial values in place. At our team in New York, we decentered our voices, we decentered our methodology and mainly followed what the team on the ground wanted. We really wanted to understand what do they wanted to study. And we were just basically a consultant team to them, you know. We called ourselves a resource partner, not a research partner. So that was a very good model that inspired me look for positions that would allow me to do the same.
Now I am searching for a place where I can use the methodological way of doing research to serve whatever the people want instead of what the donor wants or what the headquarters of the INGO wants. Just really serving the people in an evidence-driven way.
Thank you for sharing your interesting journey with us. Now, I would be very curious to learn more about your experience in those institutions as a young woman from the global South or the global Majority, depending on how we want to call it. What were key aspects that you would like to highlight that stayed with you and maybe also brought you to whom you are now?
As I was walking you through my journey, you can see that there's a pattern of dissatisfaction at every turn that took me to the other turn. When I worked in corporate Egypt, I realized that private sector cannot really alleviate public problems. That’s when I switched into studying education and working for public offices. And I realized at that point that we can't do public reform without actually studying what kind of reform has an impact. So, this led me to the impact evaluation piece. With the impact evaluation piece, I also switched from working locally to working globally in the INGO world. And the dissatisfaction was not just with the impact evaluation not leading into educational reform in Egypt. The dissatisfaction came also from the way people carried themselves in these spaces, in these public spaces back in Egypt.
I thought that by working at an international level, with foreigners (this is how colonized my brain was, expecting those white people to be more professional) I can have more impact on my government. And then this became disillusioned as well. And that's where I'm stuck in my career right now, because throughout my work at the international level, my experiences have shown me that independently on how well-intentioned staff are, we have a large spectrum of people with different levels of motivation. There are the not very well-intentioned people who go into the INGO world to just feel better about themselves and get some good dinner stories where they look like they're the white savior. So that's the far end of the spectrum.
But even as well-intentioned as people can be in this field on the other side of the spectrum, they can still be out of touch or tone deaf to what the context really is about. You know, a lot of people that we work with in the local context, their lives and livelihoods are in danger, and our colleagues' lives can be threatened at any moment, including mine. And then you find a North American White colleague who's complaining about something that's a very first-world problem in the midst of this.
And this tone deafness is an issue, and that's the least extreme form of it. But there are other more systemic forms, like hiring practices, that are linked to this white saviorism mindset, given that a lot of INGOs are headquartered in the global North. For these positions you can't even apply as a person from the global South. If you don't have the right to work in the UK for Save the Children, as an example, you're not going to have access to the central headquarters where all the decision-making is happening.
So, I got headhunted for a couple of jobs that immediately dropped me when they knew I needed a Green Card in America or another work authorization in another country, despite being very qualified for these positions. While these organizations interviewed me and loved my interview because I was talking a lot about decolonizing aid, their systemic structures are not going to allow them to decolonize aid and change the way hiring and decision-making is done. It seems there is even an automated procedure within a lot of HR recruiting tools to make entire applications invisible if they don’t fulfill the citizenship criteria. I also checked the numbers on the formal job requirements: 50% of your last EdPhil newsletter job posts actually offered no possibility for visa sponsorship. So just by that criterion I am already excluded from the application process.
There's also this belief that we people from target regions are too close to the context to be fully unbiased, particularly when working in research. That's why foreigners have to come and study our populations. I think we all come with our biases, which we should indeed question and be aware of. This is like a fraction of all the excuses I've had for not hiring me or allowing me to be part of important decisions. At the end of the day, it feels like the power dynamic within the context is very much skewed towards the white North American colleagues that I worked with. And that's an issue.
One of my favorite stories happened when I was talking to a colleague who happened to be the regional research director here in the Middle East. There was a lot of talking about decolonizing aid at that time, and this American colleague was asking me: Do you think that my employer is racist and we're very colonial? And I didn't want to say anything because people can get very sensitive about this. So, I was trying to probe her with questions. We were out sitting at a restaurant, and they were trying to order in Arabic, which is my mother tongue. And the person was excusing themself that their Arabic wasn’t great and that they needed to work on it. I told them “You asked me about the colonial ways of your employer. Do you think I would be hired at our American employer if I didn't speak fluent English?” And this person realized that no, perhaps I wouldn’t. To which I responded: “So, you see the discrepancy: I need fluent English to work in my own region and you could work in my region just with her broken Arabic.”
Or just to give you another example: We wanted to conduct a household survey in one of the projects. The team wanted to phrase it in modern standard Arabic, which is called Fusha. The data collection was going to happen through enumerators calling people by phone and asking them directly questions. As Arabic speaking people know, you can't talk to someone in Fusha, it’s not a spoken language and you usually have to switch to a local dialect if you speak to someone. I told them that we had to phrase it in the dialect, but I got a lot of pushbacks. I was even asked to provide evidence of this. Even though I live in the country, I live in this region, and I know how this region operates, they wouldn’t believe me. Fast forward, in some of my discussions with one of the enumerators, they accidentally admitted they were translating the questions to the dialect as it wasn’t manageable in Fusha. That’s one example of how my tacit knowledge was completely ignored.
Do you think with the current movement towards decolonialization and trust-based philanthropy that we are going in the right direction? Or what would you like to see happen so that your dissatisfaction could turn into optimism?
That's exactly what I've been asking myself about in recent weeks. However, I am still struggling to put it into a structure and make concrete recommendations. That’s why I am looking at different models right now. I saw one example where a foundation moved their whole trust to a number of NGOs within Africa, their ultimate target region. In my view, this shifts the power dynamic completely, as money comes with power. If the money is exclusively centered in minority countries, that's a power dynamic that's created already. That's one thing. Another solution would be moving headquarters or offices to these countries we want to serve could be a first step. That would then influence also your hiring practices. Then you could say that you have a truly international and reflective hiring and funding practice.
Another aspect is to create pipelines for development professionals in the global South. Currently, there is no pipeline. I had to work hard to be where I am today. And it's a bit frustrating that I still have to struggle to find a job, not because I'm not qualified for it, but because of my right to work. And it can be exploitative for employers as well. For example, I got hired with two Masters from two Ivy League schools to do primarily administrative work in the first project I worked for. I had to work my way in for research because it's a chicken and egg question. They tell you that you don’t have any research experience. But where would I get research experience in Egypt? We barely do any scientific research here, let alone social science research. So, by saying “but you don't have any impact evaluation experience”, looks on paper like a fair hiring practice. However, in reality it’s not because there's no way for me or other candidates from the global South to access these training opportunities that they are placing as a prerequisite. Just to give you an example, there hasn’t been any impact evaluation on an education project in Egypt as far as I am aware of. How should I get this requirement fulfilled?
Thank you for those thought-provoking ideas and reflections. I think it's very helpful to raise awareness, and it will hopefully bring us also a step further. Is there anything, throughout these more difficult aspects of your professional journey, that still gives you hope?
Yes, there is a lot more people who believe in decolonizing the international aid sector, and I think that's a good start. I'm particularly hopeful with the younger generation as they are more aware of the existing power structures. I've ultimately been networking a lot, and I’ve realized there's a mindset gap between older professionals in this field and the younger ones in terms of being able to identify and address colonial structures and mindsets. This mindset seeps into a lot of nuanced underlying ways. The more sharp-minded people are, the easier they are to spot it and then hopefully change it.
However, to truly make things work, I think we need to flip the power dynamic from headquarters, money and philanthropies being exclusively located in the global North to one which is more balanced in its funding, decision-making and hiring practices.