Francesca is an Italian change-maker, and she has been involved in the field of international cooperation since 2010. Since then, she had been working for various NGOs and UN agencies across the globe, namely in Tanzania, Kenya, Colombia and Nepal. After falling in love with South America during her travels in 2017, Francesca decided to become a digital nomad to be able to relocate there, and she has been working remotely for the Foundation 22Stars since January 2018.
Francesca had initially started collaborating with us as a virtual assistant, but she soon became our Remote Program Coordinator. Even though she had spent various years in East Africa between 2013 and 2015, she had never visited Uganda before, and she was super excited to finally meet our team in person.
When she first arrived Francesca and met everyone was very emotional, because after 5 years spent having calls every week to coordinate our remote team, and being able to see our kids and beneficiaries just through a screen, she could finally meet them in person.
During her time here she helped us improving our business program and she worked side by side with the local team doing fieldwork in order to collect data in order to measure the impact of our small business program and find ways to improve its corrected implementation and functioning.
Francesca visited our beneficiaries going to both their home in Danida, Jinja, and in Acholi quarter, Kampala, where she interviewed them about the impact of the loans received on their livelihood, enquired about their tracking system and gathered relevant information and concerns on their side. Based on the data collected she was able to develop a new framework to help our business loans recipients to improve their business and ensure a better coordination with our local team.
Unfortunately her time with us was very short, as she visited us for a month and she is now back to South America, but we were very excited to finally meet her and we hope to have her visit us again soon in Uganda.
