Poonam Sharma-UNAD, Kampala, Uganda

Poonam Sharma is an exceptional young woman, a mould breaker you might say. Up until last year she had followed a conventional career path in the NGO sector, following her post graduate diploma in sales and marketing with a range of experience in well renowned nonprofits in and around Delhi.

She had worked with Child Relief and You (CRY) on fundraising through corporate partnerships and progressed to lobbying and campaigning with Amnesty International India.

But Poonam was looking for change and challenge, an opportunity to help those less fortunate than herself and when a chance advertisement for iVolunteer Overseas (iVO) set her thinking, she embarked on a new path, a life-changing journey that would take her to Uganda. iVO is a joint initiative of iVolunteer and VSO that offers a unique opportunity for qualified and experienced Indian professionals to share their skills with disadvantaged people in the developing countries of Asia, Africa and the Caribbean/Pacific regions.

Having successfully negotiated her way through a selection day and a series of pre-departure training courses, Poonam started looking at the volunteer placement options open to her around the world. With her expertise in areas such as resource mobilization, advocacy and campaigning, she was looking for an opportunity that would make good use of her skills.

On another continent, Ugandan NGO the Ugandan National Association for the Deaf (UNAD) approached VSO with a request for a volunteer who could develop and implement a fundraising strategy, whilst building the capacity of the organisation’s staff to develop funding proposals. They needed a person who had excellent knowledge of corporate fundraising and who had significant experience of the NGO sector and this is where Poonam fits in. UNAD’s mandate is to empower the deaf through capacity building, advocacy and lobbying in order to attain its vision of the best quality of life for the deaf in Uganda. UNAD does this through carrying out sign language training, sign language research, advocacy, lobbying, information dissemination and fundraising for programmes for the deaf. If the organisational staff and members are empowered to raise their own funds, they will be able to expand the scale and scope of their work.

It’s early days in Poonam’s work with UNAD and she has many challenges ahead of her – learning to speak Luganda and to communicate using Ugandan sign language to name but two! But she is motivated to share her skills, which could make a very real difference in achieving empowerment for the deaf in Uganda.