Summer Internship: International Trade Centre – Geneva, Switzerland

The next few blog posts will feature CIPA fellows reflecting on their summer internship experiences.  First up is Stephanie Toro ’15, a second-year MPA student who is concentrating her studies on International Development, with a focus on trade.  She also serves as the president of the graduate student organization Women in Public Policy (WIPP).

This summer I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to navigate the international institutions located in Geneva, Switzerland, and specifically to complete an internship at the International Trade Centre (ITC). ITC is a joint organization of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) with 283 staff and 602 consultants in Geneva and around the world. As a half-UN, half-WTO organization, it also has a very specific mandate and is the only 100% aid for trade organization. Their slogan is “trade impact for good” and it is short and sweet, but what does that really mean?

As an aid for trade organization (AfT), ITC works on private sector development in developing economies. ITC works with country governments, trade ministries, trade support institutions, as well as with businesses directly to create a conducive environment for trade. The main beneficiaries are small and medium sized businesses (SMEs), but they also work with micro-enterprises on various projects. Their ultimate impact is to contribute to poverty eradication and sustainable development, through developing SME competitiveness and internationalization which are sources of jobs and incomes. ITC works with trade and international business development in a wide geographic range, in a variety of sectors, and at many different levels of the value chain.

My previous experience in the European Commission working with trade agreements between the EU and Central America as well as Colombia-Peru made clear me to the need to engage the private sector in a country to create strategies to pursue in the multilateral trading system, particularly negotiations. Working with a female small business owner in the Botswana pork sector through the Cornell International Institute for Food, Agriculture and Development, introduced me to the trade facilitation challenges facing businesses on the ground. My time at ITC built upon these experiences as well as my educational background in economics and political science, and my coursework at Cornell in evaluation and international trade law.

At ITC I worked in the Trade Learning and Capacity Building Programme, situated in the Division for Market Development. There I worked closely with my supervisor in drafting the proposal for this new programme area with the aim of creating trade learning and capacity building products and solutions which can be delivered at scale and with mixed modes of delivery. This included working on a product and service development strategy based on intervention logic. Through this work, which spans the training and advisory services delivered in all sections and divisions of ITC, I was also able to lodge input with the Strategic Planning, Performance and Governance unit, currently working on the new ITC Strategic Plan for 2015-2017. This work will streamline ITC’s training and advisory services and make the product and service offer more transparent to clients and donors.

Additionally, I had the opportunity to plan and execute a new training venture – a week-long training held together with the World Trade Institute in Bern, Switzerland on the “Essentials of Trade Promotion“. This week-long training brought together about 18 ITC experts on various issues and challenges in SME trade promotion, with 30 participants from over 15 countries. These participants were so bright and engaged in their work, ranging from trade facilitation for female informal cross-border traders in Tanzania to trade promotion of select value chains in Nepal.

My work at ITC has left convinced that I want to work in the intersection of trade, development, and inclusive and sustainable growth. Working in the international organizations of Geneva does place restrictions on how to perform that work. With donors, including Sweden, placing an increasing amount of aid money in very tightly earmarked funding does in a sense hamper ITCs judgment in creating longer term efforts in certain countries (rather than shorter term projects that may have lacking intervention logic). Alongside these concerns is that of monitoring and evaluation, and particularly of impact evaluation. This is where the organization needs to place an increasing effort in order to meet demands of donors, but at the same time make the best possible investments in sustainable solutions for client countries. I am convinced that creative financing solutions exist, that take into account donor requirements, ITC’s best practices in the area and need for longer-term planning, and the needs and demands of clients.