Areas of expertise: Research, Public Speaking, Qualitative Data Collection & Analysis, Capacity Building For College level students, Workshop Design and Training.

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.

Queen majored in Linguistics and Languages (French and Arabic) and took courses in behavioral neuroscience and grant writing at Bryn Mawr College, receiving a bachelor’s degree in 2019. During her undergraduate, she was an international student coordinator, among her other work-study jobs, and this allowed her to interact with students and their parents mainly sharing information about the required documents to gain an F-1 visa (for international students) and/or how to fill in tax-return documents.

Upon graduating, she worked briefly with USAID on the baseline survey for the Ngurizanshore project in Rwanda, she learnt 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 the survey that was designed by the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), in partnership with Rwanda Biomedical Center (RBC), to assess the preparedness of Rwanda national health workers in their knowledge, attitude and preparedness towards infectious diseases especially Covid 19 and Ebola.

She later on worked at the African Leadership University as a Data Analysis Senior Associate in the COO’s office. In this role she helped improve the customer support systems of the organization by centralizing them and collecting data on them. She would then make reports about this data, share it with stakeholders across the organization and train them on designing data-driven customer support strategies.

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.

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.