MAIR students must complete a summer internship as a degree requirement. There are a variety of school-run programs or you can venture out on your own. I chose the latter and through a Maxwell alumni, was hired as an intern at DIAL Africa, a small Kenya-based NGO which works in Somalia.

A key hiring requirement for my job was research and I started doing research on security sector reform (SSR) in Somalia with an eye towards future business for DIAL Africa. SSR has traditionally focused on improving local and national police through training and equipment purchases. I concluded that DIAL Africa should eschew trying to involved in a traditional program and instead create a rule of law program which incorporated laws that Somalis actually use such as xeer and sharia.

At the moment, I am helping create a new strategic plan for DIAL Africa. The idea came out of some issues a colleague showed me and with another Maxwell intern and most of the other local staff, we have created a new organizational plan. It is not something I expected to be doing but I love the fact that the local staff are highly involved. Without their cooperation and input, there is very little I could accomplish. A key area I am developing is risk management and crisis response plans. DIAL Africa works in one of the most volatile regions in the world and minimizing risk to both staff and beneficiaries of projects is an important towards future growth. My crisis management class with Bruce Dayton made my contribution in this area possible.

Yesterday, I was in a meeting at the UN Somalia complex in Nairobi and immediately saw how a more effective crisis response could make a difference. In some of the areas where DIAL Africa has projects, cases of polio have been reported. There have been 88 cases this year so far and 16 in the last two weeks. Fecal-oral transmission  is how the polio virus has spread so quickly in Somalia and the Water, Sanitation and Hygiene Cluster (WASH), a group of NGO’s working on the same issue, was called together to try to coordinate a response. With the help of local staff, my plan will help prepare DIAL Africa not just to protect its personnel but allow a rapid response towards assisting communities with reported polio cases, whether it would be testing for the virus, diagnosing the disease, vaccinations or providing WASH materials and training. Simply vaccinating people is not the only answer because there are children who have received the vaccine 10 or 12 times but get the virus because of deplorable sanitary conditions. This is the hope but Somalia is a difficult place to make things work. As recently as 2007, Somalia was polio free. The Guardian has pictures of the vaccination campaign.

I will be home in exactly three weeks and I hope to have a substantial portion of my plans complete before I leave.

Interested in learning more about Kenya, check out my personal blog, http://zackinkenya.blogspot.com

DIAL Africa’s website will soon be re-launched thanks to my intern colleague. http://dialafrica.org/