Lougein Metwally is part of AKFC’s 2025-26 cohort of International Youth Fellows. She was placed in Dar es Salaam, working as a Climate Resilience Programs and Partnerships Fellow at Aga Khan Foundation, Tanzania.
Having previously worked in Zanzibar before securing my International Youth Fellowship in Dar es Salaam, I was excited to return to what felt like a new familiar.
I already felt a sense of connection to Tanzania. During my first experience here, I noticed so many parallels between the culture and my own Egyptian background; from the warmth and sense of hospitality to the welcoming curiosity for strangers. I arrived with a determination to nurture my Swahili speaking skills, and a commitment to maintaining my openness for the culture throughout my entire fellowship. I connected quickly and settled into daily life easily — from navigating crowded roads to stopping by roadside dukanis [shops] or hopping into tuk-tuks [auto rickshaws] that weave through the city.
Adapting to life in Dar es Salaam felt natural to me, and I was excited to step into a role where I could design and promote impactful and context-driven programs. On this front, my position met and exceeded expectations, I was able to work on innovative and inspiring project proposals spanning seven thematic areas, including education, climate resilience, and livelihoods.
At the same time, I found that there was a gaping distance between myself and the issues I work on every day. Our project implementation visits illuminated how different the systems were in Tanzania to the ones I had grown up with. For my Tanzanian colleagues, an understanding of education or health systems in Dar es Salaam came second nature, and communication with project participants was effortless. For me, communication was met with many barriers, including language, making it easier to read about participants than to speak to them.
As part of a project focused on cervical cancer care and prevention, my colleagues and I travelled to Dodoma to facilitate and document the rollout of HPV vaccinations for 9-year-old girls. As soon as we stepped into our first school, clusters of students ran out of their classrooms or crowded windows to speak to us. The communities we were visiting were quite remote, so visitors from Dar es Salaam were already uncommon, but seeing someone foreign was even rarer. While the warm welcomes were always appreciated, I felt that I was acutely shifting the dynamics of project implementation, and my Swahili speaking skills didn’t feel advanced enough to engage with project participants meaningfully. Photo: Rollout of HPV vaccinations at a primary school in Bahi, Dodoma.
This is the reality that working abroad confronts us with, compelling us to navigate international development work in a more mindful and self-aware manner. While I had done the thought work around some of these dynamics, experiencing this in real life brought a whole new meaning and value to the idea of localization in the development sector. Our office at AKF Tanzania is almost entirely Tanzanian, apart from myself and one other colleague, and that profoundly shapes how our work happens and expands the type of impact we can have.
Photo: Microforest planting at a secondary school in Magomeni, Dar es Salaam.
Experiences like these have pushed me to reflect more carefully on where I fit, and where each of us fits, within development work. Positionality, experience, and personality all shape the roles we are best suited to play. I found that my most meaningful contributions occur when I draw on the wealth of expertise that already exists within my colleagues and weave this into compelling narratives about the work we are doing and the impact we hope to achieve. At other times, it is about bringing new ideas to the table and relying on my colleagues as essential checkpoints for contextualizing them within the realities of Tanzania.
As a Canadian in Tanzania, I have also felt myself stepping into a bridging role between our country office in Tanzania and international partners. Sitting between these spaces, I am often able to anticipate how certain ideas, priorities, or ways of working will be received, and adjust how they are framed or communicated. This has meant not only carrying the Tanzanian context outward, but also bringing external expectations into clearer view internally. In many ways, this ‘in-between’ space is where I have found my purpose taking shape. Being in Tanzania and witnessing our programming firsthand has been a privilege. But proximity alone is not what makes development work meaningful. It requires a deeper awareness of who we are, how we are perceived, and where our contributions are most useful. Not everyone is best positioned to do every part of this work, and recognizing that can strengthen rather than diminish our impact.
With an endless menu of options, choosing where to place ourselves is a decision that lies at the intersection of positionality, purpose, and fit. Most recently, I have been reflecting on how my Egyptian identity might allow me to work in the MENA region with a closer connection to local contexts, while still operating with an understanding of international partners and systems. Ultimately, this Fellowship has been a great starting point for helping me navigating these intersections, a catalyst for both self-discovery and career growth.