It’s not easy to describe in few sentences the fantastic experience that I have lived, but I’ll try to do my best.
My name is Nicolò Gaspari and I am a student of Management at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore of Milan. As soon as I knew about the possibility of doing this interesting and unconventional internship offered by E4Impact, I decided to take the chance. One of the main reason is that I’ve always dreamed about Africa: I felt the need to leave and try to put my efforts to improve something, morevover I thought that doing an internship in impact entrepreneurship could help me a lot to broaden my horizons. I had the opportunity to choose between a wide range of countries, Kenya was the one which attracted me more, especially for its rapid growth.
Everything started at the airport, where I met the other Italian intern, Renato, that was coming over with me. Now we are good friends, thanks to the experience we’ve lived together. At the beginning both of us we had a lack of information about Kenya and in general its culture and standard of living but, we were very keen on discovering everything about the country.
During the three months I have been living in Kenya, thanks to Daniel Mwangi, my supervisor, I had the chance to meet a lot of entrepreneurs with different backgrounds. All of them, in different ways, were trying to improve the economic and social situation of Kenya and my job was to analyse and help them develop every aspects of their companies. I had the opportunity to learn how to turn a business idea into a business plan and put in practice my theoretical studies at university.
Now that I am back in my country, catching trains and undergrounds I feel nostalgic about my trustful boda-boda drivers. Believe me, if you go to Africa your mind changes. Kenyans are amazing, their happiness is out of control especially in the way they can transfer it to you. And I will never forget the lessons learnt.
Nicolò Gaspari