learning journey in humanitarian and development fields
From the time that I was studying in college, I was interested in working for development which came into existence into my life as volunteering. XX Community Center was a great place for me to interact with disadvantaged children and people who were working/volunteering for them which was very appealing to me. This led me to decide to work in the development area as a career path. As the Syrian crisis appeared, I found myself in YY, which is a grassroots organization working with refugees in several ways. I worked with them as a Turkish teacher, which was a great opportunity for me to be accepted into Syrian community. Being into that circle showed me what kind of challenges, threats, opportunities have individuals and the community and that was the time made me decide to work in this field.
Just after my graduation, I moved to a border city, Gaziantep, to work with ZZ where I worked as an administrator of logistics for eight months, following to that my position became partnership officer in coordination. During the time that I was working, I realized and experienced that even the big scale of NGOs are very inefficient and cumbersome because of bureaucracy and not using or even accepting innovation into their tools, processes, and systems. During my working days as a logistician, I combined all of the procurement and its follow up tools into one by using some formulas and macro in excel, which decreased 20-25 minutes of work to 1.5 minutes. The time that I was partnership officer, I supported the monitoring and evaluation and programme departments to use some software tools in order to make the monitoring and evaluation more efficient and reliable.
During this experience, I was interacting with other NGOs, government representatives and participating and following UN and WHO seminars and working groups. Putting all information, knowledge, and observation, I realized that humanitarian sector is in need of improvements to increase their efficiency, which can be done with the application of some software that is already being implemented by almost all other sectors around the world. Hence, I decided to focus more on this gap in which I believed that I can put added value considering the fact that I have Management Engineering background with some experience in humanitarian and development. Currently, I am working on a project, which is still in the early development stage, that aims to improve efficiency and effectiveness of (I)NGOs', local partners' and donors' daily operational activities, and coordination.
Considering the fact that the bachelor degree that I obtained was from a different field, I feel lack of theoretical knowledge in my work. For this reason, I believe studying Sustainable Development in TT University would be a great opportunity for me to subsidize my learning journey in humanitarian and development fields by providing theoretical knowledge, which I hope to utilize it in my project as well as in my future career.
