The Fellowship That Doesn't Count

Fellowships can involve months of fieldwork, research, community engagement, travel, reporting and learning. Yet many organisations still treat them as something separate from actual work experience.

This creates a strange contradiction in the social sector. We tell young people that fellowships are valuable pathways into development work, then ask them to prove that the work they did somehow counts.

Experience should be judged by what someone actually did and learned, not simply by the label attached to the programme. If the work was real, the experience is real too.