The three months spent as a Communication Unit Intern for the UNFPA Regional Bureau for Latin America and the Caribbean flew by. Each day that passed allowed me to better understand the complexity of the organization’s humanitarian efforts, as well as the necessity of their agenda.
The UNFPA is the sexual and reproductive health agency of the United Nations. They advocate for women, adolescents and girls, and seek to ensure safe, universal and equal access to health and family planning services. They also direct their efforts to reduce gender-based violence, teenage pregnancies, and child marriages. Furthermore, the UNFPA works to develop and harmonize data bases in all regards to population and development. In the region, they pay special attention to emergencies deriving from the migration and climate crises, and localizing the women and girls who require particular types of humanitarian assistance in these contexts.
My tasks were determined on a day-to-day basis. At the beginning, I mostly translated articles and subtitles. I also organized media content of the UNFPA’s missions during the Bolivian 2024 census, the migratory crisis in the Darien jungle in Panama, the humanitarian relief women receive in the Colombian department of La Guajira, and the provision of comprehensive sexual education to afro-descendant youth in Honduras.
A few weeks in, the 4th International Conference on Small Island Developing States took place in the region. There, we worked on developing social media content and articles explaining the special challenges these territories face and its impact on sexual and reproductive health.
We later started working on the structure and texts that would compose the exposition of the regional launch of the State of the World Population Report 2024, at the fifth Regional Conference on Population and Development in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia. This event was one of my favorite parts of my internship: it was challenging to summarize UNFPA’s extensive agenda into six stations and a few hundred words. We came up with an innovative format that used personal stories and photographs of individuals scattered across the region to convey our message comprehensively. The story that impacted me the most was of a pregnant 14-year-old girl in Haiti who did not understand what her body was going through at the beginning of her pregnancy. We also presented a tri-generational story of three women in Bolivia that illustrated how contraceptive methods put women in charge of their futures.
Finally, I was able to attend the annual Communications Workshop. Representatives from each country office convened in Panama, and for three days I attended talks about the importance of branding to secure funding and participated in interactive activities to brainstorm new communication projects, among many other activities.
Overall, every day at the office was an opportunity to learn. Needless to say, my internship brought me both professional and personal growth, as I also dove into the inner workings of the United Nations, the day-to-day aspects of this meaningful job, as well as the richness of a highly diverse and multicultural workplace.
On top of that, as a recipient of the Vanasse Wilbert International Experience Internship Award, I was able to focus on my internship without any financial worry. For that, I thank the Arts Internship Office, as well Martine Vanasse and Randall Edwin Wilbert II for their generous funding and help throughout this overall transformative experience.
