Devex takes a look at some of the unusual, adventurous, and awe-inspiring global development jobs we have come across last year — from artisanal chocolate in Côte d'Ivoire, to sea life conservation in South Africa to sustainable tourism in the Andes. Meet some of the global development professionals doing work that will make you say, “I want that job.”

1. Devex takes a look at some of the unusual, adventurous, and awe-
inspiring global development jobs we came across last year — from
artisanal chocolate in Côte d’Ivoire, to sea life conservation in South
Africa, to sustainable tourism in the Andes.
Meet some of the global development professionals doing work that
will make you say, “I want that job.”
I want that global development job

2. Sam Williams is based in Medellín, Colombia, as
director of a social enterprise called Project Cordillera.
The organization uses sustainable tourism to create a
positive impact on the communities it works with
across South America.
Helping vacationers travel with impact, Project
Cordillera’s mission is to “connect the life-affirming
experiences of adventure with the life changing actions
of local people in their own communities,” says Sam.
The travel agent to impact seekers

3. The team at Project Cordillera is made up of
social entrepreneurs, development
professionals, and travel experts who love
discovery and mountain adventure. They focus
on education for development, protecting
mountain ecosystems, and developing standards
of service, safety and sustainability within
tourism. The social enterprise supports local
guides and services and donates 50 percent of
profits to community initiatives.

4. “One of the things we set our sights on from the beginning was how people and
communities are represented to the outside world,” says Sam. “We promote beautiful,
wild, and sometimes unusual places for people to visit but, for us, people are always
central to even the remotest places.”
Sam now spends a lot of his time in the office in Medellín but was previously based in
remote mountain areas of Peru where he enjoyed regular trips to the local climbing spot
and spending weekends in indigenous villages or on high icy peaks.

5. “I think we’re all really proud of the work we do,” says Sam. “By supporting locals in
their own fight for survival and improving the life chances of their children, and
encouraging pride in and respect for sacred mountain areas, travelers will always go
home with unique and inspiring moments, as well as the knowledge that their
impact truly was a positive one.”

6. The Ivorian Willy Wonka
Instant Chocolate is a company
specializing in manufacturing chocolate
from cocoa bean to chocolate bar and
with personalized packaging. Founded by
three young Ivorians, its mission is to
promote the local processing of cocoa and
to promote the “Made in Africa” brand.

7. Axel Emmanuel is an artisanal chocolate
maker and one of the founders of Instant
Chocolate. The cocoa processing market
represents billions of dollars but Africa
receives very little of that after exporting
African-grown cocoa beans to the rest of the
world. Emmanuel says that through example
they hope to encourage more Africans to
transform the continent’s raw materials, not
only cocoa beans.
The trio have already started a cooperative, and believe that in five years they
could create 40,000 jobs for women in rural parts of the country by replicating
their model.

8. The company hopes to establish rural chocolate shops and train women
farmers to make their own chocolate and increase their own incomes. The
three founders also hope to encourage the production of other products
derived from cocoa such as butter powder, soap, and infusions.
Emmanuel’s artistic creations are even displayed
at viewings in Abidjan. “I really appreciate the
artistic aspect of my craft because I sculpt the
chocolate and I reproduce African objects of art in
chocolate,” he says.

9. Building dreams through ice cream
Alexis Gallivan is one of the social entrepreneurs behind
Blue Marble Dreams which she founded with her friend
in 2008. The nonprofit venture aims to create jobs and
happiness through building ice-cream shops, and focuses
on working with women in areas recovering from
conflict or natural disaster.

10. Blue Marble Dreams has evolved from their
first venture with Ingoma Nshya — a
cooperative in Butare, Rwanda. Together they
built the town’s first ice-cream shop which is
now a fully self-sustaining enterprise and
owned and operated by the cooperative.
Blue Marble Dreams launched their second
project in Port au Prince, Haiti, in 2016. Bel Rev
– which comes from the Haitian Creole
meaning “sweet dreams” – was built from
repurposed shipping containers, and trains and
employs local women.

11. After many years of travelling back and forward to Rwanda and Haiti, Gallivan now
supports the ice-cream shops in grant writing, press inquiries, and capacity building
from afar, while local staff and partners take care of the operations on the ground.
Gallivan fondly remembers the looks of joy and those simple moments when people
took a “little fantastic joyful break” from their hard lives and were transported
through ice cream, and says that’s “what it is all about.”

12. When your work friends speak whale
Barry McGovern spent some time working with the Namibian Dolphin Project and
Sea Search Africa as a Ph.D. student. He was mainly based in Cape Town, where he
focused on the analysis of the data he collected during his research in Namibia.

13. The Namibian Dolphin Project is a research and conservation project working in Walvis
Bay and Luderitz in Namibia. Founded in 2008, the focus of the organization is research
on coastal dolphins and whales in Namibian waters with the aim of producing high-
quality data for use in both science and management. NDP works with local NGOs, the
marine tourism industry and the Namibian government, and is managed as part of Sea
Search Africa.

14. McGovern moved from Ireland to join NDP in
2015, and ran their organization’s operations in
Walvis Bay where he collected data for his Ph.D.
project. He says has always been fascinated by
wildlife and marine mammals.
“The more I’ve worked in this field the more the
main perk has changed from just seeing them to
actually being able to do something that can help
their future. That’s why I particularly loved
working in Southern Africa as many of the
species aren’t so well known and the worry
would be that by the time we know more about
them it may be too late to stop a potential
decline,” says McGovern.

15. The sustainable coffee connoisseur
Sara Mason is the founder and principle
consultant at SHIFT Social Impact Solutions, a
consulting firm that focuses on supporting
collaboration across the coffee value chain.
Mason had previously worked in consulting for
private sector companies, and with
international development NGOs and donors.
She explains that the idea for SHIFT was to
help the two worlds work better together.

16. Mason now works entirely in coffee and
sustainable agriculture. “After working on one
project in coffee, it was clear that the coffee
industry was a place where there was
considerable potential to achieve development
impact through the private sector,” she
explains.
One of her biggest achievements is still winning her first grant. Since then
Mason has worked on designing, acquiring, funding, and managing substantial
projects with coffee industry partners.

17. “As an entrepreneur, I do everything. I’m
the visionary, admin, website designer,
project manager,” says Mason. “I work
remotely, which sounds nice in theory;
days are long because they start when
Africa gets to work in the morning and
end when the East Coast U.S. leaves the
office,” she explains. “People see photos
of me travelling all over the world and
think I have a glamorous job, but they
don’t see all the work that’s gone into it.”

18. Despite the hard work and extensive
travel, Mason says she absolutely
loves her job because it allows her to
be part of so many different things –
she works with large coffee
companies, small producer groups,
NGOs, donors, and popular coffee
culture enterprises.
“It’s a great feeling to wake up knowing you’re doing something where you are the
one person who has the ability to put together all of the pieces,” Mason says.

19. Devex’s very own Kelli Rogers spent 11 months
reporting on global development issues from different
parts of the world. Rogers, now based in Bangkok as
our Asia correspondent, was an associate editor and
based in Washington, D.C., before being invited to join
Remote Year and the small cohort of professionals who
would work remotely while travelling the world
together for one year.
The roving reporter
Rogers had been eager to get closer to the stories and spend more time talking with
aid workers and local groups on the ground. By the time she arrived back in the U.S. in
June this year, Rogers had visited 20 countries and often found stories wherever she
went.

20. “I move every four or five weeks, which
means there is no typical week. I devote
the last week in each place to reach out
and plan what I’ll focus on in the next
location,” said Rogers at the time. “The
idea is that when I arrive, I’ve lined up one
or two local reporting trips on top of the
reporting and editing I can do from
anywhere,” she explained, “So one week I
might be having meetings for a story on
entrepreneurship in Morocco. A few short
weeks later, maybe I’m looking into
lessons learned from Vietnam’s drought or
setting up a video interview with a food
rescue group in Malaysia.”

21. From a reporting perspective, highlights of
the trip for Rogers included the two months
she spent in Eastern Europe and her time in
Southeast Asia.
“This year has given me the opportunity to
step back from editing and grow as a
reporter,” she said. “I’ve honed my video
storytelling skills. I’ve also been able to travel
to remote areas that would have been far
harder to access if I weren’t already living in
that nation’s capital – like a reporting trip I
took to rural northern Cambodia while I was
living in Phnom Penh and to Harmanli refugee
camp while I was living in Sofia, Bulgaria.”

22. The things which made the year great
also made it challenging. “Moving every
month means making new contacts every
month, and leaving behind those I’ve just
met,” said Rogers. “There was a lot of
picking stories on the fly then doing a lot
of legwork to make sure I understood
enough of the local context to report
them successfully,” she added. “I also had
to say goodbye to my D.C. reporting team
and the idea of going into the office every
day. It’s been a good change, but
certainly a dramatic one.”