Being underestimated is sometimes an advantage

When asked to tell her story, Alice Quagliato answers the phone from her office in Burundi. She is in the African country as head of delegation for Terre des Hommes, a Swiss NGO working to secure legal protection for minors and internal migrants. For the graduate in Economics and Management from Bocconi University, working in international cooperation was a natural choice, in light of the care and concern she has always had for others. 

She says: “I didn’t see myself working in a company; I was oriented towards the cultural sphere. I was looking for a job that would give me close contact with people; human and enriching at the same time. Milan, where I was born and grew up, has always felt too small for me.” The lightning bolt moment with the world of cooperation came during an internship in Brazil centering on microcredit. It was there that Quagliato discovered the world of the favelas of São Paulo, learned Portuguese, and decided that this was her path: to work for the sustainable development of the world’s poorest countries. She graduated from the Italian Institute for International Political Studies (ISPI) in 2006/2007 with a Master’s degree in Diplomacy and began living out of a suitcase. “Like a nomad, off the tracks,” as she often says. 

First she went to Mozambique to work on a microcredit project aimed at developing entrepreneurial initiatives by women, then to Senegal, Madagascar, India, and Kosovo, where she worked for various organizations, including Oxfam. A journey around the world, running large and small projects, with micro and macro salaries, which led her to add “polyglot” to her résumé. In fact, she speaks Italian, French, Portuguese, English, Spanish, Romanian, and Swahili. 

In this job,” she says, “you see everything: poverty, injustice, dictatorships, violence. But that is also the spark that lights the flame. Despite the daily frustrations and the feeling of tilting at windmills, you want to try to change things. I solve problems: that’s what I like best about my job.” Which means coordinating people by managing financial resources to get projects off the ground at a grass roots level, with no small number of challenges, at a personal level too. 

“When I started, the NGO heads of mission were all men; today, fortunately, that is no longer the case, but as a woman I had to find different channels to dialogue with the local administrations, which are almost always run by men. You get underestimated, but that’s an advantage in the long run; and in the short term you have more maneuvering room, and the element of surprise is on your side.” 

For Quagliato, however, more women are needed at the top of international cooperation missions. “I am convinced, and this is also the reason why I choose to hire young women whenever I can, that there is a need for women leaders in NGOs, which must be empathetic organizations. It would also be a way of preventing the scandals involving abuse and violence that we’ve been reading about in recent years.”

For people aspiring to work in the field, Quagliato has one, or rather two, pieces of advice: “Study the language and culture of the countries where you want to work, and think outside the box, because your career, whatever it may be, never follows a linear path.”