Apprenticeship in Madrid, Spain!

by Odile Jacquemin

Lore and I met two months ago when we started our apprenticeship in Madrid, Spain. Both of us are freshly graduated women and now we are also EU Aid Volunteers! We are going to be deployed in a few weeks as Financial and Admin Officers for eight months.

Lore studied Politics and Economics in UK and I studied Economics and Management sciences at Louvain school of Management in Belgium. Despite our differences, we share our passion for international cooperation and our desire to discover the reality of the field.

But before being deployed our sending organization, Alianza por la Solidaridad, offered us the opportunity to do a two-month apprenticeship in its headquarters in the vibrant Spanish capital, Madrid.

This apprenticeship is meant to better prepare us for our volunteering experiences in the field. It was the perfect opportunity for us to learn more about Alianza, its work, policies, staff members, about the projects but also to learn a lot about the financial part of the NGO. Indeed, during this period we both supported the financial team with budgeting, auditing and other daily tasks. In this way, we fully understood the link between Alianza’s headquarter and its offices in Mauritania and the Middle East – where we’re going to be in few weeks. This apprenticeship was also very important because we created strong relationships with people working at Alianza’s headquarter and, remotely, field offices. Similarly, we had the chance to speak with other EU AID Volunteers who are currently deployed and hear about their suggestions and advices!

Thus, thanks to these two months spent in our sending organization’s headquarter we gained professional expertise and knowledge about the financial and administrative processes Alianza uses, and we are now ready to support our hosting organizations! We will write soon about our volunteering experiences in our respective deployment missions in Mauritania and in Middle East!