World’s Coolest Internship: Sharing How State Supports Global Enterprise

Excerpt from: DipNote | By: Kidd Duhe Solomon | April 1, 2016

Before arriving, when I imagined my duties as a U.S. Department of State intern, I assumed they would consist of two things: picking up visas and delivering coffees. I never expected to brief a room of over 100 Ambassadors about the power of online business registration in an effort to promote global prosperity.

The website I presented on at the State Department’s Global Chief of Mission Conference, the Global Enterprise Registration portal (GER.co), seeks to promote simple online business registration procedures to promote entrepreneurship, reduce corruption, and help businesses around the world join the formal economy. In my first college international development course, we learned about how people who live in systems without formal procedures are often not able to accomplish everything they would like to achieve. We also discussed the importance of working with local populations when trying to solve a development problem. GER.co combines these ideas by capturing the natural entrepreneurial spirit and inspiring governments to create an easy route for businesses to formalize. It is a rare internship where students can directly work on combatting the key development challenges they studied in an academic environment, but that is exactly what I am doing at the Department of State.

I began working on GER.co with the Office of Investment Affairs by designing mock Facebook pages. By the end of my internship, I was creating content and promoting GER.co at a conference for senior-level government officials. I am still amazed that as a State Department intern, I have been privileged to directly contribute to global efforts aimed at improving the lives of the 1.6 billion people who work in the informal sector; and all before I turn 21 years old.

So you can only imagine that the prospect of briefing a room full of ambassadors was a nerve-wracking experience. To me, GER.co is a tool to promote global prosperity and one I thought our U.S. embassies could benefit from being better informed about. However, following Vice President Biden with my power-point presentation was not an easy feat. Imagine my surprise when the Ambassadors laughed at my jokes, nodded in agreement, and thunderously applauded at the end of my presentation. When I finished I was overwhelmed with a sense of pride. Not pride for myself, but pride for the people who make up the Department of State. These individuals care about the fate of the globe and seek to discover any way they can help, whether that means listening to the Vice President or an intern.

Assisting with projects that impact the global economy has been an amazing experience, but what makes this the coolest internship is working with people who can find inspiration for good anywhere, and everywhere, they look.

About the Author: Kidd Duhe Solomon currently serves in the Office of Investment Affairs and is a student at Tulane University studying International Relations. Kidd Duhe hopes to pursue a career in the Foreign Service to assist in the promotion of the capabilities of persons across the globe.

For more information:

• Visit Global Enterprise Registation for more information on this initative.
• Read other DipNote blogs on economic diplomacy.
• Follow the Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs on Twitter at @EconEngage and on Facebook to learn more about the State Department’s efforts to advance economic diplomacy.