Elizabeth Umutesi Queen
Class of 2025
Umutesi Queen is passionate about sustainable development. Her life mission is to bridge gaps between resources and the people that need them the most, and she believes the best way to do this is through using data-driven and people-centric approaches. Her areas of expertise include: research, public speaking, qualitative data collection and analysis, capacity-building for college-level students, and workshop design and training.
Queen majored in linguistics and languages, with a focus on French and Arabic, at Bryn Mawr College, receiving a bachelor's degree in 2019. She also took courses in behavioral neuroscience and grant writing. During her undergraduate studies, one of her work-study jobs was as an international student coordinator, which allowed her to interact with students and their parents, sharing information about the documents required to gain an F-1 Visa and how to fill in tax return documents.
Upon graduating, she worked briefly with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) on the baseline survey for the Ngurizanshore project in Rwanda, where she learned and practiced how to design and utilize surveys as tools for monitoring and evaluating the efficiency of a given intervention. She then went on to use these skills in the review and utilization of a survey designed by the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), in partnership with Rwanda Biomedical Center (RBC), to assess the preparedness of Rwandan national health workers in their knowledge, attitude, and preparedness towards infectious diseases, especially COVID-19 and Ebola.
She also worked as a senior data analyst in the COO's office at the African Leadership University. In this role, she helped improve the customer support systems of the organization by centralizing them and collecting relevant data. She prepared reports on this data, shared it with stakeholders across the organization, and trained her team in designing data-driven customer support strategies.
During her free time, she likes watching documentaries, practicing new languages, playing Scrabble, talking to people, or taking walks while chasing sunsets because she simply can’t get over their beauty.
Why GHD?
Queen hopes to use her knowledge and experience from the GHD program to help design monitoring and evaluation frameworks for intervention programs in developing countries. Her dream is that there would be more and more intervention programs that empower local communities to outgrow their need for intervention.
Summer Internship
Over the summer, I got the opportunity to intern with the World Bank in the Agriculture and Food Global Practice, in their Rwanda country office. My arrival was timely as the team was conducting their annual Missions; these two weeks felt like a crash course in program evaluation and through it I got a deeper understanding of the challenges and opportunities that the CDAT and SAIP projects of the Bank were designed for. I conducted a database quality assurance review for the midline evaluation of the CDAT project, identifying crucial data collection needs to enhance evaluation comprehensiveness of this project’s impact. Additionally, I made visualizations for the PRODEC(Turikumwe) project to communicate progress effectively against set objectives. My participation in stakeholder meetings, including with the Agriculture Joint Sector Review allowed me to gain insight while also asking questions to enrich the results framework for these projects.
This practical application of the concepts learnt from classes such as Public Finance and Program Evaluation, among others, deepened my understanding of the challenges and opportunities in financial inclusion for smallholder farmers in Rwanda. Engaging with key stakeholders gave me a more nuanced understanding of the complexities of partnership and budget allocation negotiations between the World Bank and various public and private entities, reinforcing my commitment to fostering efficiency in fiscal management in low-income countries, starting with Rwanda, my home country.