Chapter 3: The Work Behind the Work- My First Policy Assignments
After spending my first week onboarding and getting familiar with the organization’s pace and way of working, I was excited to receive my first assignments.
One involved organizing the citations for a policy brief on Fraud and Scams. The other was updating the data behind the HeatMaps used in presentations for Women’s World Banking’s Global Policy Advocacy Strategy.
At first glance, both tasks seemed fairly straightforward. In reality, however, they became valuable learning experiences in many different ways.
Having just completed the Policy Design and Delivery core course at Harvard Kennedy School, this was my first opportunity to work with a real-world policy brief. It was exciting to see concepts from the classroom translated into practice. Although I had previous experience compiling citations, ensuring that every reference followed the organization’s preferred style and formatting required careful attention and several rounds of communication. It reminded me that clear and consistent documentation is a small but essential part of producing high-quality policy work.
Updating the HeatMaps was equally rewarding. The HeatMaps compile data from 30 countries across five policy areas: digital ID, payments, consumer protection and legal frameworks, MSMEs (micro, small, and medium enterprises), and jobs. Each indicator is color-coded to reflect different levels of progress, from areas requiring immediate attention to those demonstrating healthy progress.
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My role was to extract, verify, and update data from several major international datasets, including the World Bank Global Findex Database 2025, the Women, Business and the Law 2026 report, and The Global State of Financial Inclusion and Consumer Protection. Working with these datasets gave me a much deeper appreciation for the quantitative training I received from Professor Teddy Svoronos at HKS. His statistics course not only made data analysis enjoyable but also emphasized practical applications that I found myself drawing on throughout this task.
That said, there were certainly moments when I felt like an “Excel idiot” while cleaning and organizing the data. Fortunately, I am living in the age of AI. After plenty of trial and error (and many conversations with ChatGPT), I finally completed the updates with a real sense of accomplishment.
I hope these updated HeatMaps will contribute, even in a small way, to Women’s World Banking’s upcoming advocacy efforts. More importantly, this experience reminded me that behind every policy recommendation is an enormous amount of careful, often invisible work from checking citations to validating datasets. It’s meticulous work, but it’s also the foundation of credible and impactful policy.
