Interview with Maud, a PN board member

Maud Lhuillier is a member of the Board of Directors (BD) of Passerelles numériques (PN). She has been a part of the PN adventure since the very beginning since she was the first Accenture employee to go on a six-month PN mission in Cambodia in 2006. She went to Asia for two weeks to meet students and the teams at the 3 Passerelles numériques centers.

Hello Maud, you have just returned from a trip to Asia where you visited the 3 Passerelles numériques centers. Could you explain the object of your trip?

The main object was to strengthen the relationship between the field and the BD and provide it with more information in order to focus on our actions. Basically, for all of us to get to know each other better!

It is the Board of Directors’ responsibility to assist PN with its major decisions and the options it takes. To be able to do this, it was important for me to go and meet the teams on site and thus personally understand what we do in the centers and share for a few hours, or days, their operations, and daily lives. Also, it is really illuminating, very motivating and encouraging to be able to meet the teams, the families, our partners and the students.
Equally, for the teams, it provided an opportunity to better understand the role of members of the BD, to get to know these rather distant executives whose mission is sometimes little known.
Finally, it provided an opportunity for setting up a dialogue on the changes that Passerelles numériques is undertaking at the moment.

Regarding this point, the Passerelles numériques Board of Directors was modified in November 2014, and indeed, this was when you joined it. What are the challenges, the aims and objectives defined by the new members? What measures will you deploy?

In my view, the role of the BD will remain the same: to provide Passerelles numériques with the means to accomplish its mission wherever necessary, that is to say, to be a pertinent, efficient stakeholder in order to “make a real difference” for students and their families, in the countries in which we operate, whilst respecting the fundamental principles of our approach (the 5 pillars).
But, the conditions and the environment in which we carry out this mission have evolved, leading the BD to taking decisions regarding our structure.

A few examples of this are:

• The needs of companies in terms of IT skills are constantly and rapidly changing.
• Our financing now needs to be increasingly sourced in Asia, which is rapidly expanding.
• The educational landscape of the countries in which we operate has changed greatly in the last 10 years and a sort of “competitiveness” has arisen – which is excellent in itself – but means that we need to supplement our educational measures to ensure that our Passerelles numériques diploma remains attractive and recognized.

This has led the BD to take an important decision, namely the choice of proximity. By deciding to base practically all our teams in Asia in 2016, we have taken the decision to place ourselves even closer to the companies, the educators, the financiers, but also to the students and all our partners. And thus be able to respond to their needs, by being innovative, progressive, agile and even pioneers.

With regard to proximity, which were the most notable meetings, discoveries or experiences you encountered during your recent trip?

The most moving was a visit to the family of a PN student in the Philippines, near Cebu. I am very familiar with the conditions of penury in which the families we support are living – I’ve been to numerous similar homes over the last 15 years in other areas of Asia – but still, it’s a reality that hits you, almost slaps you in the face, and which encourages you.
During the two hours’ discussion, face to face, in their house, I was once again touched by the warmth of their welcome, the interest they showed in their children’s studies and the toughness of their daily lives.
The most amusing was an improvised quiz with all the PN students in Cambodia in the big hall on the top floor of the school. We laughed a lot before two of them gave me a guided tour of their classrooms, recreation rooms and hostels.
The most striking was the young boss of a Filipino web marketing start-up describing the reasons for being one of the most faithful partners of PN and employer of our graduates, whilst stressing the challenges that our training needs to manage:

• “sticking” with IT needs that are constantly changing,
• whilst retaining the specific strengths of our graduates: their interpersonal skills, their commitment and their adaptability,
• and developing as much as possible our “financial autonomy”, and therefore a certain freedom of action.
  It is also during these sorts of exchanges with our partners that the term “bridge” becomes meaningful.

You joined the PN adventure 10 years ago. Now that we are celebrating this anniversary in 2015, can you describe how you met Passerelles numériques?

It was a “bridge” story right from the start!! Really. The one built in 2003 between Accenture (rediscover the history of this great partnership by clicking here) and its employees, under the impetus and coordination of the organization Enfants du Mékong (EDM) and previous volunteers in the association. Finally, an obvious bridge between the skills, needs and wish for commitment.
As I had been a volunteer with Enfants du Mékong, I contributed to building these links by organizing short missions by the first consultants who went for 3 weeks to work on the various EDM projects in Cambodia between 2003 and 2005.
This initial partnership morphed into a more ambitious project: the CIST (Center for Information System Training) in Cambodia, which subsequently became Passerelles numériques.

I was then given the opportunity of going on the field to work on the first market study, prior to the launch of the CIST (in 2005) and the first long-term mission in 2006, as head of External Relations. I was specifically responsible for preparing students for their internship and for “placing” them in companies.
So it was that I was lucky enough to be closely involved in the birth of Passerelles numériques.

What are your best memories?

Contributing to the birth of a project like this is obviously to accumulate “best memories”. I will share three with you:
The first is an overall feeling: the permanent “start-up” spirit that reigned in 2006. The relatively small size of the first intake (25 students) gave us enormous freedom of action and experimentation. Today we would call it “test & learn” project management. Everything went so fast, from an idea to implementation and a result in an atmosphere of commitment and constant profusion. I think it was this that made it possible to set up a number of principles and tools that are still valid today.

The 2 others are very concrete:

• The choice of the second intake. We were running a bit late with the exam grading schedule. A working group was set up and we enlisted the entire staff, for a whole night, to finish in time, all of this in an incredible atmosphere!
• Finally, managing to find useful internships for the 25 first PN students in businesses as prestigious as Phnom Penh airport, the local “yellow pages” directory, Takkral, one of the major IT equipment distributor, the FAO (the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization), etc. and, to be able to tell our young people that they had landed their first business experience.

Imagine just how much ground these 25 students had covered in a year, students who had no previous knowledge of IT or the business world. That will give you an idea of the joy we and they felt at the idea of carrying out their first internship!

If you had to share a message with the Passerelles numériques teams on site, what would it be?

It would be a message of congratulations and support!!

Thanks to my visits, I have seen all the incredible gymnastics and the agility required of a field job even more clearly. Because it is there that all the emotions of our NGO’s mission are felt most intensely: the joys, the difficulties and also the contradictions: being in the closest proximity to the beneficiaries; taking action and being conscious every day of the progress, the results; living the difficulties of everyday life; getting involved on numerous different levels (from communication to management, via selection, recruitment, life in a community, and many more besides); trying to think of everything extra that could be done, or done differently; feeling constrained by time, by available means and enduring the frustration that that engenders; sometimes feeling so far away from France, misunderstood or not really heard. In short, being permanently subject to the contradictory requirements of commitment, that is to say, ambition, needs and resources.

I admire the work achieved even more: the energy expended, the creativity visible in the 3 centers to enliven and enrich the educational measures we offer!

Consequently, I would like to say to them: “Feed us with your ideas, with your desire to “move mountains” to do more and/or differently. The BD shares your desire to innovate and to think big in order to implement Passerelles numériques’ mission”.

Thank you Maud !

Check out all our Board Members here. You can also find testimonies by Alain Goyé and Hakara Tea, two other founding members of Passerelles numériques, by clicking here.