Louise Cord
When Louise Cord embarked on her semester in Paris, she didn’t anticipate that her host mother – a nun who ran an NGO out of her home helping orphanages in Vietnam – would change the course of her life. But seeing the inner-workings of the office and meeting people committed to the postwar relief effort sparked an interest in development that turned into a career dedicated to poverty alleviation. After securing an internship with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) with the help of IES Abroad, Louise went on to earn a Ph.D. from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. Since joining The World Bank in 1991, Louise has worked in Africa, Latin America, and Eastern and Central Europe in a variety of positions in the poverty reduction and sustainable development departments. Today, Louise is based in Dakar and serves as the Bank’s Country Director for Senegal, Cape Verde, The Gambia, Guinea Bissau, and Mauritania. Read on to learn how her study abroad experience helped launch her career in international development.
IES Abroad: Why did you choose to study in Paris?
Louise Cord: I always loved France. When I was ten, I studied in Nice with my family. My parents were professors and had taken a sabbatical year. I grew up in rural Pennsylvania and very much enjoyed the year I spent in Nice and attending 6th grade in a French school. Almost ten years later, I wasn’t loving college and I was looking for another experience and opted to try Paris.
IES Abroad: What are some of your greatest memories from your time in Paris?
LC: I loved living in the 7th arrondissement near metro Duroc. I could walk everywhere and was in the heart of Paris. We were not worried about security in those days and would stay out late at night walking the streets of Paris, the banks of the Seine and exploring cafes. I made great friends and have wonderful memories of hopping on a train at the last minute to travel to the October Fest in Munich or take the hovercraft for a budget weekend in London. We would often study at the museum library in the Centre Pompidou where I would look out the window and see Sacré-Cœur and Montmartre and be inspired by the view. Perhaps most importantly, what I appreciated was the chance to experience life outside the classroom, outside the college library and outside small town USA. While I worked relatively hard that year in Paris – I also took time to explore the city, travel, meet people and play more – which ultimately helped me figure out much more who I was than all the time spent studying back at home.
IES Abroad: You have devoted yourself to improving the lives of poor people in Latin America, the Caribbean, Mexico, Eastern Europe, Central Asia and Africa. How did you become interested in poverty alleviation?
LC: I owe a tremendous amount to IES Abroad because that experience really changed my direction. I started out as pre-law and worked in a law library for our county judge in Indiana, Pennsylvania. I looked at all of the books and thought, “Really, I don’t want to study law.” The next summer, I took an economics class and discovered that I loved economics. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with economics. I knew that I didn’t want to go into business and make widgets. I had no idea where I was going. Going to France was a fantastic turning point in my life.
I was assigned to live with a nun. I had wanted to be independent as I already spoke French and initially was worried that this would be a restrictive environment. However, Soeur Francoise changed by life. This was 1979, and she was working on orphanages mainly in Vietnam dealing with the aftermath of the war. She was running an NGO and raising money for these orphanages and engaging in the post-war international aid effort to help the country recover. The room that I had was part of her living room. It was partitioned with a plastic wall, and on the other side was her office. People were going in and out of the house, including many Vietnamese and public officials. She introduced me to many people who worked on Vietnam, on development and on humanitarian aid. I ate with her twice a week and the dinner conversations with her and her guests got me very motivated about development and Vietnam. This was particularly interesting to me because my sister was dating a Vietnamese guy at the time and was about to marry him, so I also felt that I had a personal stake in Vietnam. I had always known I wanted to do something that would contribute to making the world a better place, and that year I started to understand how I could shape my career to contribute to that goal.
IES Abroad: Were there any other experiences abroad that impacted your career path?
LC: IES Abroad got me a fantastic internship at the OECD. One of the IES Abroad professors was able to place two students as interns with the OECD each year. At the end of the internship, I stayed on for the summer in a paid position. I worked with the Development Assistance Committee at the OECD. It was an incredible experience learning about aid and aid issues. I remember I wrote a paper about technical assistance and the challenges of building national capacity through aid – an issue that remains core to my work today. One of my bosses was from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, and I became interested in Fletcher and ultimately went to graduate school there. I remained in contact with Soeur Francoise for many years until she passed away. She came to the US for my wedding! I married a French man who was raised Catholic, and Soeur Francoise was the Catholic representative.
IES Abroad: You joined The World Bank in 1991 and have worked in Africa, Latin America, and Eastern and Central Europe. How did you prepare for each post and what are some of your most memorable experiences?
LC: The World Bank has been an incredible and rewarding place to work. I have had the opportunity to work with the Mexican government as they prepared for NAFTA and sought to remove agricultural subsidies and find instruments that they could help the farmers adapt to the new trading environment, to work with countries in Africa to support them to develop their own national poverty reduction strategies, to be one of the first international aid practitioners to go into Albania and work on agricultural development, etc. As a manager for the poverty team in Latin America for many years, we helped countries use data on household welfare to better craft fiscal policy and social investments to benefit the poor – it was an exciting and optimistic period of relatively strong growth in Latin America, coupled with falling poverty and inequality in the early 2010s and there was a lot to learn from the poverty programs of the countries. I learned Spanish early on during my career at the Bank taking an intensive course. However, the most important learning for me has come around management and leadership skills mainly developing an ability to empower teams to innovate and achieve results.
IES Abroad: Tell us about your current role as Country Director for Senegal, Cape Verde, The Gambia, Guinea Bissau, and Mauritania. What are some of the most important projects are you working on?
LC: The five countries that I cover are incredibly diverse. Senegal has a long tradition of democracy and relatively strong institutions, but has struggled to achieve strong economic growth, with limited natural resources and low productivity in agriculture. The government has set its sights on achieving the high growth rates similar to the Ivory Coast. The challenge we face is understanding the political economy to be an effective partner to help the Government adopt the structural reforms in energy, agriculture, land, and transport that will help it achieve these higher rates. The Gambia and Guinea Bissau are both fragile states, with very weak institutions. Here the challenge is find how we can improve the living conditions of the poor – the majority of the population – and create the conditions for more inclusive growth, in the face of a political instability and a weak public sector. In Cape Verde, we are accompanying a small island economy address its high debt issues and explore a new development paradigm with a larger role for the private sector to help the country restore the higher growth rates and poverty gains of the decade before the 2009 global financial crisis.
IES Abroad: Were there other ways study abroad also impacted your outlook?
LC: My experiences as a student in France with IES Abroad put a very human face on development. I learned a great deal about what was going on in Vietnam. It gave me a real concept about the challenges and made it very real. At that time, people didn’t travel as much as they do now. My experiences gave me a real appreciation for the challenges and the importance of tolerance. It was very important to me!
IES Abroad: Having an international perspective obviously is critical in your role at the World Bank. What advantages do you see in study abroad for people who want to maximize their potential?
LC: Learning the language is critical. Knowing the culture is critical. You need to build the human connection. My experience as a student in France helped me develop that flexibility and create the ability to understand and respect other cultures and engage earnestly with people who have a different background – which is essential to my work today. We can’t help catalyze the policy changes I talked about above, unless we listen and seek to understand the issues from the countries’ perspective. I work in the public sector, but I would think this skill is equally as critical in the private sector. Also, it is so critical today to have an international perspective. It is a real plus as an individual and as a professional to have this in your toolkit in today’s world.
IES Abroad: What advice to you have students today regarding studying abroad or otherwise developing cross cultural competencies?
LC: Study abroad! It is such an incredible experience to get to know other cultures, to travel when you are young and on a budget, and to know and appreciate another country and people. Take risks – don’t only spend time with you fellow students – make an effort to integrate and to try understand the culture, the political situation and the socio-economic challenges facing the country and region where you are studying.