Building an award winning NGO: the challenges and reality behind the dream to make a difference

CID Research Fellow Tim McNaught interviews Filipe Alfaiate and Ariana Almeida, Co-Founders of the Timor-Leste based NGO, Empreza Diak. Filipe and Ariana talk about how their dream to make a difference became an award winning NGO empowering poor women and their families in Timor-Leste, the newest and most impoverished country in Asia. Interview recorded on February 10th, 2017. They focus on what can be learned from the challenges, mistakes and successes they faced in the past six years while launching the timorese NGO Empreza Diak (which means Good Business) and developing a sustainable team of staff, volunteers and donors. All passionate about changing lives by creating opportunities that build better lives, not charity.

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Incredible progress has been made throughout the world in recent years. However, globalization has failed to deliver on its promises. As problems like unequal access to education and healthcare, environmental degradation, and stretched finances persist, we must continue building on decades of transformative development work. The Center for International Development (CID) is a university-wide center based at the Harvard Kennedy School that seeks to solve these pressing development problems—and many more. At CID, we believe leveraging global talent is the key to enabling development for all. We teach to build capacity, conduct research that guides development policy, and convene talent to advance ideas for a thriving world. Addressing today’s challenges to international development also requires bridging academic expertise with practitioner experience. Through collaborative, in-country partnerships, CID’s research programs, faculty, and students deploy an analytical framework and context-dependent approaches to tackle development problems from all angles, in every region of the globe.