"In consulting, you are doing a lot of face time advising senior leaders," Gardner says. "Here, we got to see directly how these people operate, what their communications skills are."
While experiences in developing nations are ripe with management lessons that can be applied to situations in established economies, the people of these countries are often looking to hone the kind of skills that are taught at U.S. institutions.
After graduating from college, Neda Navab spent two years as a management consultant at McKinsey and Co. before taking six months off to work for a non-profit in Rwanda. There, she worked with entrepreneurs, helping them develop business plans and go-to-market strategies.
"It didn't open my eyes to the world," she says. "It expanded and redefined what I know about the world. I didn't know how little I understood about the world until I went to Rwanda."
Whereas investment banks and consulting firms tout their diversity, Navab found that she was working with people of different races and religions at McKinsey, but all of them had similarly privileged educational experiences.
In Rwanda, that was not the case.
Navab set out to create a business training program for women, but just advertising free classes was not nearly enough. She needed to identify the skills women would need in a country where 93% of the people lack access to electricity. Then she had to recruit students and convince them that basic business skills would help them improve how they run their businesses, which were mostly farming cooperatives.
"We needed to explain to them why they should make these sacrifices," she says. "They didn't realize that what they learned can be used outside the classroom."
Navab and her team were successful, helping more than 200 women develop their marketing, negotiation, and accounting skills.
"It amazed me how badly they wanted to learn, the sacrifices they were willing to make for their education," she says.
And that is part of what is luring Navab and others of her generation to places like Rwanda, she says.
"We're looking to do something more with the tools that we have been given," she says. "These values are instilled in us at good schools, then we go to investment banks and consulting firms and find something missing."
While they may be able to expand their network in London or pick up a new language in Paris, in third-world countries, they feel that they can put what they have learned to use and watch it grow.
"We have these really powerful toolkits that we can use for something impactful," Navab says. "I can get so much more mileage out of my skills being in a developing country."
