Gabi Hyman

Gabi Hyman joins the Global Human Development community as a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer. During her two and a half year service in Ecuador, Gabi worked as a foreign language instructor in a rural farming village. While Gabi’s primary obligations were to raise English proficiency amongst the teachers and students of her school, she felt a strong pull toward local development efforts. She worked alongside community stakeholders, school administrators and teachers, and members of her village to build and equip a community English Laboratory with over $27,000 in grant funds and community donated materials. Gabi looks forward to completing similar projects in the future after exploring sustainable development in greater depth at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service.

Before her endeavors in South America, Gabi attended the University of Washington, in Seattle, Washington, where she completed a dual major in Political Science and Spanish. She also studied at the Center for Modern Languages in Granada, Spain, ending her foreign exchange program with native proficiency in Spanish. Throughout her undergraduate studies, Gabi participated in several campus organizations and volunteer groups. As the Vice President of Event Management for her sorority, Gabi raised over $40,000 for the Ronald McDonald House Charities and organized over 35 volunteer events for college students during her tenure.

When she isn’t studying or working, Gabi can be found planning her next travel adventures or doing the New York Times Crossword. Gabi speaks fluent Spanish and is learning French and Hebrew to support her language development. If she’s not reading memoirs or knitting, you might see Gabi running half marathons or hiking mountains.

Summer internship

Over the summer, I had the opportunity to work with the World Bank’s Latin America and Caribbean Gender Innovation Lab (LACGIL) in the Dominican Republic, contributing to a Comprehensive Sexual Education (CSE) program in coordination with the University of Chicago’s Development Innovation Lab and the Dominican Republic's Ministry of Education (MINERD). Implemented in all secondary schools across the country, the CSE curriculum seeks to challenge current biases surrounding relationships, sexual behavior, and teenage pregnancy; especially pertinent in the Dominican Republic where about one in five adolescent girls become pregnant before graduating high school (UNICEF). As such, it was incredibly rewarding to directly contribute to the creation of the CSE curriculum, writing student and teacher exercises to be used in this upcoming year’s implementation. In addition to producing curriculum, I developed the project’s Monitoring and Evaluation plan and resources, constructing the M&E schedule, writing monitoring questionnaires, and programming these resources to be used by surveyors in the field. 

In addition to my work with LACGIL, I was honored to collaborate with the gender empowerment team at Banco BHD, one of the Dominican Republic's principal financing institutions. Banco BHD has several arms dedicated to securing women’s financial access, through targeted women’s entrepreneurship programs, women-only credit cards, and insurance policies and loan schemes specifically created to benefit single women in the DR. Not only did I learn more about these innovative financing strategies, but I had the opportunity to contribute directly to their mission through analyzing their digital financing platforms and making recommendations to executive members on how to further enhance their women-focused approach. In collaborating with their “Women Who Change the World Award”, recognizing the efforts of local women empowering their communities, I had the experience of conducting field visits to meet these fabulous women and evaluate their initiatives.

I return to Georgetown to complete my second year in the Global Human Development program with a more intimate understanding of how human capital projects are implemented in the field, and how the private sector may be leveraged in women’s empowerment initiatives.