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Brilliant's Internship Reflection

Hello everyone! My name is Brilliant Fane, and I am from Botswana. I am currently pursuing my master’s degree in International Affairs with a concentration in African Development Policy at the Pennsylvania State University. Before I started my internship with SIHMA, I always had a deep passion for African issues ranging from development, education and other social issues like poverty. This passion steered my choice of major for my undergraduate degree. For my bachelor’s degree, I majored in African Studies. With this major, I got a deeper understanding of the African continent and some of the challenges it faces.

On May 29, I had the pleasure of joining SIHMA as a Research and Communications intern for the period of 8 weeks. During my stay at SIHMA, I got to work with amazing colleagues like Father Filippo Ferraro, Samantha Coetzee, Muluh Cletus and Nathan Mangena, all of whom I got to learn from. When I joined SIHMA, I did not know much about migration issues within the African continent especially migration patterns in the Southern region. However, with the research articles I wrote, I got the chance to expand my knowledge on migration issues in Africa. The most exciting moment for me at SIHMA was doing a migration profile on Botswana. This task was very enjoyable because coming from Botswana myself, I realized that my country has a lot of work to do in improving its immigration policies and, as someone who wants to venture into Development after graduation, I believe that migration is inextricably linked to development. Therefore, Botswana’s problem with stagnant growth could be solved by a more open migration policy.

During My stay at the SIHMA office in Cape Town, several research articles and contributed to a project to write migration country profiles for the African continent, of which I did one on Botswana. I also had the wonderful pleasure of overseeing communications for a while, which involved publishing some content on our Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter pages. Additionally, I had to stay informed about any migration-related news and wrote some in my press reviews. I wrote several blog posts about migration-related issues like the most recent and controversial issue of the cancellation of the Zimbabwean Exemption Permits (ZEP) and the relationship between female migration and Gender-Based Violence. 

Here are some of the research articles and blog posts I published during my internship:

[1] https://sihma.org.za/Blog-on-the-move/female-migration-and-gender-based-violence

[2] https://sihma.org.za/Blog-on-the-move/where-do-we-go-from-here-uncovering-the-story-behind-zep-cancellation

 

To my fellow colleagues at SIHMA Father Filippo, Sam, Nathan and Muluh thank you so much for making my stay at SIHMA a memorable one. I had a good time, and I learned a lot from each and everyone one of you. My biggest take from SIHMA is that we are all family irrespective of our cultural backgrounds, race, ethnicity etc. umuntu ngu muntu nga bantu! You are because I am!

 

With Love 

Brilliant Fane

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