Thank You, Miriam!
Mariam Badi served as Emerging Public Leaders’ Global Program Manager since 2018, where she created the administrative and communications foundations for the organization, helped to build the Ghana team from scratch, and provided programmatic support for three cohorts of fellows. Mariam was accepted to the MBA program at Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania and will start that program this year. Before she left we asked her about her experience working for Emerging Public Leaders.
Q: What are your reflections looking back on your time at Emerging Public Leaders?
Mariam: It’s so good to see how far the organization has come. I watched it go from a business plan to a scrappy startup, and now we’re about to start work in a third African country. We launched the Ghana program with no office and now there are five people in the office in Accra. It was also my first time working with a fully African team and as a first-generation American whose family is from Ethiopia, that was a great experience.
Q: Tell us more about that.
Mariam: In the United States, I have found that I am often the African in the room. But in Accra, I was really the American in the room! The team and the fellows helped me see my own cultural biases and teach me that what happens in one country isn’t always going to work in another. The showed me that even though it is essential, working with government can be difficult, especially cross-culturally. I remember being told, “your deadlines aren’t going to work here!” It inspired many moments of self-reflection.
As a young professional myself, I really empathize with the fellows and what they want. Coming from an African background, I know the pressure to work hard and show your parents that you are successful. With the fellows, they are often the first in their family to go to college and get a job like this.
Q: What else did you learn from the fellows?
Mariam: I will always cherish my first trip to Ghana to run orientation for our first cohort, at a time before we were fully staffed up. I got to be the first face of Emerging Public Leaders for them. The fellows taught me that we are more similar than we are different. We are asking ourselves the same questions about our careers: Does this make sense for me? What else should I be looking for? What can I bring to the job? We’re all striving for more, striving to be the best versions of ourselves.
More than anything they helped me realize the importance of mentorship especially at this stage of your life. There’s something about graduating and that window of the first five years and anything can happen. But when I have had people in my corner, I have benefitted and I want to do more for others.
The fellows also made me feel like Ghana is a place where I am welcome home. Even though they work really hard, they also showed me that there’s more to life than work. It is important to take the time to build culture and community; they taught me that.
