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Our Impact

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At Roots, we believe internships can make an impact.

Doing an internship in Africa is an amazing way to get practical work experience, absorb a foreign culture, have a travel adventure, and build your resume. But we believe internships in Africa can do more; they can also make a true impact, in several ways. 

Our interns support nonprofits at grassroots level.

As an intern with us, you’ll be working for small organisations with big missions. These are charities that run worthwhile social development, environmental, or wildlife conservation projects around Africa; projects making tangible impact on people’s lives and their environment. Whether your focus as an intern is NGO management, fundraising, communications, or something else, your work will contribute to these causes. It’s a rewarding and much appreciated experience.

Our interns get inspired to do more.

As a happy offshoot of our internships in Africa, many of our interns end up making positive life changes after their internship. They adopt greener lifestyles, actively fundraise for the cause they’ve been part of, or even adapt their career path and end up working in the charity sector.

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We love Roots Interns! Its intern program is really top-notch as each candidate is pre-screened for us. As a result, we’ve gotten great interns that match the skills we need. The interns from Roots add tremendous value to our organization. They have helped us redesign our website, conduct marketing campaigns, gather and crunch data, and create promotion videos around our projects – and they have learned new skills along the way. They are integrated into all aspects of our work – attending weekly staff meetings and in some cases, take part in our monthly board meetings. Roots checks in regularly to make sure everything is running smoothly. Roots has made bringing on interns into our organization a really easy and painless process.

Charles RiceCEO, Developing Radio Partners
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Having a partnership with Roots and hosting interns at our school has definitely been one of the best changes that we could have possibly made. Not only do the interns provide life, joy and energy into the school, they also come with so much dedication, creativity, passion and skills. It has really pushed our organization in a forward direction. And we now have a bigger Baobuyu family from all around the world.

Tammy RaymondFounder, Baobuyu Learning Center
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Greenpop would never have been able to achieve what we have without the help of our interns. We've had people from around the world bringing incredible knowledge and expertise to our work - one intern built a cashflow forecasting system for us, another designed a watering system for our nursery and another made a fundraising video that we use to this day. Along with bigger projects like those above, all our interns have been integral to our team, assisting with the daily running of our NGO and allowing us to make big impact with limited resources.

Lauren TeasdaleManaging Director, Greenpop
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Small nonprofit projects often go unnoticed outside the communities they work in. Without a large workforce or financial budgets for functions such as marketing, they often lack the exposure, funding, and skills to progress to the next level; Roots Interns offers a bridge to that. Their targeted approach and the value add offered by their interns make it possible for our grassroots projects to take meaningful strides towards sustainable development.

Holly KiftCo-owner, Butterfly Space
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Our interns have made a huge difference to our organisation. They have assisted us with fundraising for and sustaining our efforts to improve the lives of the poor and less fortunate. They have helped with our on line presence, and even arranged sponsorship for a website. The interns have increased our capacity and enabled our organisation to progress. They enabled our organisation to grow. The Roots team take great effort and care in finding the right match for an organisation, and we have had the pleasure of hosting some incredible humans! Thank you to the Roots team, who are able to understand the needs of an organisation and find the right interns to take the vision and goals of grassroots organisations forward.

Candi HorganFounder, Projekt Ubuntu
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We partnered with Roots when we were in the early startup phase, and our interns have been an integral part of our growth. Roots enabled us to build our capacity with skilled professionals, and have a much bigger impact than we would have otherwise had.

Leonora TimaFounder, Kwanele South Africa