From Milan to Manila: Manuela Prina reflects on 16 transformative years at ETF

Manuela Prina has been at ETF for 16 years and, as she prepares to move on, it’s a good opportunity to look back at how both ETF and she have changed in that time and what the future might hold for both of them. 

“Manu”:

“Manu”, as she’s known to everyone, was born in Monza and grew up in Sesto San Giovanni, a suburb north-east of Milano nicknamed “the Stalingrad of Italy”. Her father was a unionist, her mother an entrepreneur: “la Signora Laura” had two companies producing components for air-conditioning solutions. 

“So for me to go and work in the public sector”, Manu laughs, “was a big failure for her. She kept repeating to me ‘but it’s not even yours, why put all your time into the public sector?’”

Her reply was very simple: “I knew I could make a contribution. I really cared about, and believed in, the public sector playing a role in society.” 

University and First Jobs:

She studied Education Sciences at Milan’s Cattolica university, but after going to Calcutta in her last summer as an undergraduate, she was perplexed by seeing poverty up close and pivoted to write a thesis on globalisation. 

After graduation, she was writing an MA on the relationships between the World Bank and civil society when, in 2002, she got hired by the Bank itself. “I was there for two years as a junior professional associate, which is a program for young people where you work for the bank for two years, and then you have the obligation not to work for them for at least two years.”

“I was based in Rome. I was working in front of the Colosseum and travelling to Paris and to Washington. I still remember my first day at work picking up a phone call from Washington with this guy speaking with a full-on New Yorkese accent. I didn’t understand anything, so it was a steep learning curve in terms of language.”

“Fifty percent of my time was spent with the central recruitment unit that was working on appointing senior positions at the bank. The other half of my time was with the external relations unit, working in particular on civil society organisations in Italy and Europe.” She kept up academic research too, combining her work at the World Bank with writing her doctoral thesis on political economy (“with a focus on human capital”). 

After two years at the World Bank, in 2004 Manu moved to Manila to work for the Asian Development Bank for four years. “There”, she laughs again, “they would put you in water and see if you could swim. I was 30 and suddenly had the chance to negotiate alone with a whole country.”

“You’re exposed and you have to learn fast. There’s pressure on you but on the other hand you’re given an opportunity to really put yourself into doing something. Those four years were fantastic. I was working with Central Asia, particularly Uzbekistan.” 

“During my last mission for the ADB in Uzbekistan, the Minister of Education called me in for a meeting and gave me two presents: a tea set, to remind me of the team work done together, and a doll bed for my daughter who was a baby back then. He said ‘Manuela, your children will have always a seat in our schools’. it was a moment where I asked myself if I had done really all I could, thinking of all children as my own responsibility, and of schools as if my own children had to be there. I often think of these words, as they remind me about responsibility we have in our jobs.”

Asia had, says Manu, “a different way of doing business. There was much kindness, but also a lot of ritual. I enjoyed that a lot, I found it fascinating. I also learned that I had to be more aware in terms of communicating within a cultural context, being attentive and listening.”

It was a job in which she saw, first hand, the effect of loans. “There were big gains. A loan is a huge operation, but it can really change the life of people on the ground. So I learned to go beyond thinking that these are complicated operations that are detached from the life of people. And instead, I came to really appreciate the cascading effect.”

Working at ETF:

When Manu was hired by ETF in 2008, she became country manager for Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan, helping to shape a project called Schools Development in Central Asia. Three years later she had a more transversal portfolio, working on the roll-out of the Torino Process. 

“The Torino Process”, she says, “was a capacity-building program to help countries to focus on evidence based policy-making [in Vocational Education and Training].” She also helped colleagues implement the first application of the Torino process on a sub-national level, working with different regions in Ukraine. 

“We worked on specific data-collection methodologies in some countries, including reinforcing the qualitative methods of work. And at the same time, I started to follow these big events for the ETF, working with the Directorate to shape these Torino process conferences, which were happening every two years”.

“It was about supporting stakeholders in very specific fields,” she recalls, “including reinforcing data collection in certain areas. But in most of the countries, we realized that it was the way the policy cycle was built that was at the heart of change. So lot of the work was around what we called ‘the principles of the Torino process’. It was evidence-based. It was about participation, about the ability to talk to and to involve different kinds of stakeholders in the policy cycle, setting objectives and taking ownership of what you want to achieve”.

She has been at the helm of many other projects. “There was one called ‘Entrepreneurial Communities’, which I did with Pirita where we experimented with the power of bringing communication into the project design. It was about how bottom-up initiatives were shaping the future of work and the future of education.”

It was a new way of working: “instead of doing a lengthy reports, we worked a lot with videos and with story-telling. And I remember this big discussion back then with some colleagues about who was the hero of the story. So for some, it was the person who found a job because of the project, while, from our side, the hero was the policy-maker, the person making decisions who managed to put together all those elements to deliver on that objective.”

She was subsequently promoted to a managerial role where her ambition was, she jokes, to make herself redundant: “I play the game of becoming useless! Because, for me, a manager’s job is done when you are not needed anymore.”

“But you have to be recognised as a credible interlocutor for your team. I remember my first six months, I spent my weekends reading and reading. I asked all the team members to bring me everything that they were expecting me to know, and I literally read everything.”

“Because it’s important that your team members can sit down and go through a brain-storming or an unloading and recognise that you pick up the trigger points because you understand what they are talking about. Even if I would say they are more expert than you in the specific field, which is how it should be.”

“In the last four years, as head of unit of our knowledge hub, I’ve tried to shape the ETF work on knowledge by working with the team on forms of co-creation, partnerships and new areas of knowledge. One area is the importance of skills development for adults, and the engagement of all citizens in learning new skills linked to the digital and the green transitions.” 

“We’ve changed our focus from ‘producing reports’ to ‘using knowledge for action’, creating networks and new ways of communicating key messages including through digital communication and having a presence in international forums. My vision is that the ETF is ‘in the future’, ready for the requests of tomorrow and offering a service of anticipation and inspiration that makes our stakeholders aware of, and ready to manage, what is ‘coming up next’. 

“I couldn’t be prouder of all my colleagues who are excelling. When I was looking for information on the ETF before applying for a job in 2008, someone told me ‘ETF has the best experts in the world’. After 16 years here, I fully subscribe to that statement.”

Personal Changes:

In these 16 years at ETF Manu has changed her way of working. “I’m more patient”, she says. “I don't know if it’s experience, or age, but I’m less impatient to see something happening quickly. When I was fresh from my PhD, I was very proud of what I had achieved and was so eager to put my knowledge into action. Whereas now I don't feel like that anymore. I know what I know, but I also know that I don't know. And so my work is more built around dialogue.”

Manu describes how her work has become more about collaboration. “I’ve learnt to leave space for things to take shape: not to build the origin of the river, but to follow the flow a bit and then put maybe some triggers here and there. It's more dialogue with people through which you co-create things, as compared to you doing something and imposing your knowledge on others.”

“I also think that I’ve changed a lot in terms of philosophy: so when I look at project or at actions, I have a bigger viewpoint than I did 16 years ago. I see ETF more in the global arena rather than as an agency which is active in a very specific area of the world.”

It hasn’t always been straight-forward to balance professional life with four children. “I think”, she says, “that a lot of people don't know the effort that a working woman has to do to keep things running and holding together her professional and private life.” It something she has tried to acknowledge with her own colleagues: “For me, it's very important when I talk to my team members that I see them fully. Because I know what it means to come back to work having had a small child, or when you have someone at home who is not well. To work well it's important that you are one and you are not divided.”

“Something people often say to me is ‘you must be exhausted’. Well, I rarely feel exhausted! But it’s true that sometimes I’ve made myself less of a priority because I want to deliver on everything else.” Manu recalls feedback from colleagues who have gently said “you should make time for yourself” or that she should sleep more. “These are the happy moments in my 16 years of ETF life, when we take care of each other.”

The Future:

“I think if you asked my colleagues, many might say that our working life at the ETF is now organised differently. In the past we worked much more as a team, on fewer projects and concentrated on one country/region. Whereas now it’s more like a social media network: you are part of many teams that continuously change geometry... The result is that you perceive more fragmentation, but in reality you have a higher ability to manage the complexity of our times. You really need to interpret and find connections to make sure you deliver.”

“For me,” she says, “the future is about focusing on our clients, for those who have to really take responsibility to shape the systems of the future. We need to give them a boutique service. It's something which is very private, because the minister would never say on social media, ‘I need help’. We need to give them a support which is so exclusive they will be at ease in asking for help, because they know that here they will have all the support they need with the necessary attention too!” 

In the new year, Manu will relocate to Manila and return to the Asian Development Bank as Principal Education Specialist. Her family will be joining her there: “first my youngest, then the twins with my husband. My eldest will just come on holiday.”

The Bank has had a large increase in investments for education, so they’re shaping up a new strategy for the region. Manu’s job will be to contribute to sharpen that strategy, focusing on “skills and education for all of Asia and the Pacific”, working transversally across regions and boosting the knowledge force across its operations.

Manu leaves ETF with immense goodwill in her wake. Everyone at ETF wishes her well and we trust our paths will cross again very soon