Making a cross-border impact
Students entering social work are often motivated to make a difference in their immediate communities. But Ms Sharon Low (Arts and Social Sciences ’97) has challenged that notion with her international humanitarian career.
Ms Low’s humanitarian work has taken her to countries such as Liberia. (photos courtesy of Sharon Low)
Open the old passports of Ms Sharon Low and you will find an assortment of immigration stamps and visas from destinations as diverse as Somalia, North Korea and Afghanistan. Ms Low amassed this impressive collection during her time with various organisations in the humanitarian sector, including the International Organization for Migration, International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) and The Knowledge House.
Believe it or not, it never crossed her mind when she enrolled in NUS to major in social work that her career would take her across borders, let alone some of the most militarised places on the planet. “I first came across the social work major by accident, really,” she reveals. “In those days, we’d have to buy university prospectus booklets to figure out what we wanted to pursue for our undergraduate degree, and someone had left theirs behind at my void deck. Even though I was only in secondary school at the time, I picked it up — and nothing really spoke to me except social work.”
GOING PLACES
Some of the countries that Ms Low has worked in:
North Korea: As a Red Cross delegate monitoring and reporting on relief operations after typhoon Olga in 1999.
Afghanistan: Set up region-based multi-sectoral Monitoring & Evaluation systems with the Aga Khan Foundation before co-founding community businesses and a consulting firm — the Knowledge House — with a group of Afghan professionals.
South Sudan, North Sudan, Liberia: As a project administrator with Doctors Without Borders.
Myanmar, Thailand: Led a large-scale population survey with border-based ethnic health organisations across conflict-affected areas of Myanmar, and continues to support and advise the multi-ethnic Health Information Systems Working Group to this day.
Her four years at NUS opened her eyes to the concept of community work. “It’s about getting different people’s perspectives. This is especially vital in the field of social work, where there are differences in perception, which need to be understood through either the lens of particular systems or political economies,” Ms Low explains, adding that even the concept of an ‘ideal state’ often differs among stakeholders. “In the international landscape, there is a strong top-down narrative,” she explains. “Recent years have witnessed a movement to shift that narrative to balance the power between stakeholders.”
A scene from Ms Low’s time in Afghanistan.
This approach has guided Ms Low on her latest path, as one of the Managing Partners of a recent strategic alliance between three social enterprises in Singapore tentatively renamed Soristic-The Knowledge House. It promotes decision-making around project implementation, research, evaluation and policy advocacy together with locals to address core issues concerning their communities “It’s not strictly what was taught in social work in Singapore but the application of concepts is relevant in humanitarian operations with acuity and sensitivity to politics and relationships,” she adds.
A photo taken in Somalia during an assignment to understand the situation of displaced people.
A CULTURE SHOCK
What Ms Low’s undergraduate degree did not prepare her for was the international nature of social work. Back in the 1990s, it was uncommon for tertiary students to go on exchange programmes. “As such, we were not really exposed to international affairs and foreign cultures, which is very different from the experience students have today,” she elaborates.
Thus, Ms Low had a bit of a culture shock when she was first exposed to cross-border work during an early stint at the IFRC. “As I was the only staff who had done Chinese as a first language, I was often asked to either help to translate or do interviews for the Chinese media. So when IFRC asked for someone to join their evaluation team for a Chinese flood relief operation in 1998, I was put forward as a candidate,” she recalls. “I was sent there to help evaluate their projects. I eventually spent two months travelling between provinces.”
The experience exposed her to the possibility of working internationally at a professional level without going through the missionary or volunteer route. “It was a path less travelled but a path nonetheless,” she says. “After meeting many professionals who worked in the humanitarian space, I was keen to explore this path. It was not a typical one for Singaporeans back then. For many years, friends thought that I was a “professional volunteer”.
Ms Low is candid that in many ways, she was in the right place at the right time. “International humanitarian work up till then had been dominated by people from the West. So the fact that I was a ‘triple minority’ (female, young, Asian) made me quite an interesting candidate.” But she is quick to add that she still had to prove that she had the chops. “For the roles that followed, I had to send hundreds of resumes and applications,” she shares. “Eventually, it got easier as I gained experience and acquired the necessary knowledge and skills needed in this field.”
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In the international landscape, there is a strong top-down narrative. Recent years have witnessed a movement to shift that narrative to balance the power between stakeholders.
NURTURING GLOBAL GRadS
Driven by her own university experience and belief in the importance of international work, Ms Low took a break from her humanitarian career to work at NUS to support the set up of the NUS Overseas Colleges (NOC) in 2002.
NOC was a bold initiative by the then-NUS President Professor Shih Choon Fong and the late Professor Jacob Phang to immerse NUS students in leading entrepreneurial hubs around the world with the aim of inculcating entrepreneurship among the students and nurturing a new generation of technopreneurs.
Looking back at her time there, she says, “It was a unique opportunity. Back then, entrepreneurship was quite unheard of and it was seen as a ‘last resort’. But the team was confident that it would take root, and it has.” She is proud to see how far NOC has come today, with some of the students being founders of successful startups and companies, with a few achieving unicorn status.
Text by Roy Sim . Photos courtesy of Sharon Low