Malika is part of the 2025-26 cohort of AKFC International Youth Fellows. She worked in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania as a Monitoring and Evaluation Fellow at the Aga Khan Health Services. Read her Dispatch to learn about her experience.
Dear Malika,
You’ve just finished packing up your life into three suitcases and have moved out of your apartment in Toronto. I know you feel 100 different emotions at once — excitement, fear, gratitude, sadness, anxiety, and happiness. You’re questioning what awaits you in Tanzania and what you will return to in Canada. You’re dreading saying goodbye to your friends and family for eight months, but I can assure you, you will feel them with you as you embark on the life-shaping journey ahead of you. At the start, these mixed emotions will follow you. You will be excited to explore Dar es Salaam, meet your team, learn about the projects you will be working on, and make new friends, while also feeling challenged by the new environment and trying to settle in and make Dar home. What will ground you throughout will be your bajaji (three-wheeled motorized taxi) rides to and from work as you cross the bridge over the ocean. This will never get old — every day, the view of the sparkling ocean will be the pinch-me moment where you remind yourself that you are living in one of your manifestations. Walking into the Aga Khan Hospital for the first time, you will feel like you stick out and you will question your place there, having no medical background and knowing very little about public health. However, as you are warmly welcomed to your team, you will quickly learn that you are exactly where you should be.
With them, you will visit four different regions as part of the East African Comprehensive Women Cancer Project (EA-CwCP) — Shinyanga, Mwanza, Dodoma, and Morogoro — as you support in the mobile clinics with breast and cervical cancer screening and HPV vaccinations in schools.
During your time working directly with local communities, project documents come to life. Indicators represent real people and outputs become experiences and lessons learned. As you are new to Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E), being in the communities makes your work feel less abstract and instead tangible and deeply human. It will be then that you learn the importance of M&E work in any project, as it helps to ensure that the voices and experiences of the individuals your organization seeks to serve are reflected in how success is defined, measured, and communicated. You will collect quantitative and qualitative data, gather stories, mobilize women in communities, identify what in the process is working and what is not, and document personal takeaways to inform later reporting.
These lessons and insights stay with you when you return to the office in Dar. Your work will carry new weight and clarity which makes you approach each task with a sense of purpose — constantly grounding technical decisions and conversations in the lived realities you witnessed.
Slowly, you realize you no longer feel the imposter syndrome you initially felt. It will click for you that when coming into a new environment where you hope to contribute, it’s not about knowing everything in advance. You realize that the background and experience you have are relevant anywhere in the development sector because your competencies are rooted in human-centred work. You can develop hard skills whenever but the human-centred approach you have to life and work make it easy for you to adapt to any new environment — even in the public health sector. As you find your voice at work, it will shine through in the way you are able to meaningfully contribute to foundational project documents. You will be appointed to the Baseline Evaluation Committee as a technical expert, where you will learn about the processes of selecting a consultant and undertaking a baseline evaluation for a project that spans two countries. You will also join the Operational Committee where you will communicate with the Kenyan project team to share progress updates. You will also grow your understanding of another area: climate change. You will attend numerous training sessions and learn about the ways we, at the individual and at the institutional level, produce carbon emissions and the ways they can be tracked and minimized. As the hospital applies to receive a Joint Commission International Accreditation, you work with the NetZero project team to track progress on these emissions, report on strategies implemented, and present plans to continue to further reduce emissions. You will be proud when the hospital is successful in being awarded the accreditation, as you feel you were part of a win for the whole institution.
As time goes on, you will pride yourself on the quality of the relationships you build with your coworkers both on your team and in other departments in the hospital. You will work on a diversity of assignments, like a 2026-2031 Strategic Plan and an M&E report on SDG progress in Tanzania, which will allow you to better understand and contribute to your host agency and meet more of your colleagues working in both the medical and non-medical departments. One of your biggest takeaways from these eight months is that professional growth and personal growth were never separate paths. They develop together, shaping your resilience, perspective, and sense of self. When you see your growth at work, you see it equally reflected in who you are becoming.
One of your intentions coming into this experience is wanting to develop your independence, and you do exactly that as you become more comfortable in your new environment. You will explore the city, go on a solo trip to Zanzibar, try new yoga and Pilates studios, experiment with pottery, painting, paddle, and tennis. You will go on long walks by the ocean and pick up running! The time you spend with yourself becomes your time to learn about who you are on a deeper level. What hobbies do you have? What were you passionate about when you were younger that over time you forgot about? This time alone will also be difficult. You will question if your relationships back home will be as strong when you return. You will wonder if you are on the right path professionally. But all these internal conversations will be exactly what you need to move forward with clarity, purpose, and optimism. This time alone will also lead you to appreciate the friends you have made throughout the experience and the support system you have been lucky to have. You will become good friends with the other Fellows in the cohort, and you will be able to meet with past Fellows with whom you bond over your experiences. Your colleagues will also become some of your closest friends as you spend so much time with them in and out of the office. You will learn a lot from everyone you cross paths with, and you will carry these relationships forward with you into the next chapter.
By the end of the Fellowship, imposter syndrome no longer defines you. Confidence replaces doubt. Groundedness replaces anxiety. You come to understand that listening, empathy, and human-centred thinking are powerful tools anywhere, even in sectors and environments you never thought you would end up in.
And as you return, these lessons stay with you:
- You bring human-centred thinking into every new project, remembering that listening and understanding are as critical as technical expertise.
- You maintain relationships intentionally, honouring connection even across distance.
- You embrace uncertainty as opportunity, knowing that growth often lives in discomfort.
- You carry confidence earned through navigating unfamiliar spaces, letting it inform leadership, collaboration, and creativity.
So, Malika, step forward with trust, curiosity, and openness. You will be challenged on multiple levels, both professionally and personally, which will shape you into someone more confident, more capable, and more attuned to both systems and people than you imagined possible. You got this.
With reflection and anticipation, Your Future Self
Since 1989, almost 600 people like Malika have participated in AKFC’s International Youth Fellowship Program. No matter your background, the Fellowship program is open to individuals who are driven by the desire to learn about unfamiliar contexts, cultivate a global mindset, and make a meaningful change in the world.