Students

Coming from a poor rural village in the Philippines from a family which earned a gross income of USD 4 a day, Amina has experienced firsthand the desperation and hopelessness of poverty. Her family broke through the classic tale of generational poverty through a microfinance loan her mother used to start a small business with and a college scholarship which first sent her to University of the Philippines Diliman and eventually to Ohio Wesleyan University to finish an undergraduate degree in Mathematics (Summa Cum Laude).

Ina Ajazi joins GHD after three and a half years of working in development. She spent the last year and a half working for Lions Clubs International Foundation (LCIF) as a Program Specialist for the foundation’s SightFirst program.

Mouayad Albonni graduated from the Economics Department at the American University of Beirut. He is from a town in the Qalamoun mountains north of the Syrian capital, Damascus. Arabic is Mouayad’s mother tongue, he is fluent in English, and can communicate fairly well in French.

Rachel joins the GHD program after nearly two years in Burkina Faso where she founded an entrepreneurship accelerator program for women and girls in high-risk communities. A dual citizen of Brazil and the United States, Rachel is fluent in Portuguese and proficient in French and Spanish.

Romeo Arahan, from the Philippines, joins the GHD Program after six years of experience in the development sector. He was a senior program officer for Social Enterprise Development Partnerships, Inc., a consulting firm that provides training, research, and consulting services to development stakeholders in the fields of microfinance, social entrepreneurship, and financial inclusion.

John “Jack” Borkowski earned his BA in Government and Politics from the University of Maryland at College Park with a minor in Philosophy. For his senior thesis, he researched monitoring and evaluation methods for U.S. cross-cultural programs in Ukraine with a focus on student exchange.

Maputi is from Port Elizabeth, South Africa, and has over 4 years of international work experience at the intersection of global health, technology and supply chain management. Maputi worked at John Snow Inc. (JSI) as a Program Officer on the USAID | DELIVER Project.

Alexandra Bracken joins GHD from the International Youth Foundation (IYF) where she spent the past four years supporting youth workforce development programming in sub-Saharan Africa. She most recently worked as a Program Manager on a systems change initiative designed to strengthen Mozambique’s vocational training system’s responsiveness to labor market needs.

Anne Buckley joins GHD after working in community development as a Peace Corps Volunteer for the past two years. Annie began as a Community Economic Development agent in Mali where she spent six months working with a women’s agribusiness cooperative.

Rebecca Chamberlin joins GHD after serving through AmeriCorps as the Volunteer Coordinator at a non-profit organization in her hometown of Des Moines called Ethnic Minorities of Burma Advocacy and Resource Center which assists refugees living in Iowa.