An experience that teaches what you can’t learn in a classroom 

In rural regions where supports for women can be minimal, a small women’s enterprise is not a side project. It’s the difference between a household with supports like health and income, and one without.

Shelina Gwaduri saw this firsthand in 2006, outside Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, in villages rarely reached by foreign aid workers.

“That’s where you truly felt, not only the community, the people, the openness,” she said, “but you truly understand the country and they were quite open, they were quite open to share.”

Her job was not to hand these women a plan made for a capital city. Her job was to find out if that plan made sense once you left the capital. Often, it didn’t. So, she wrote her final report around what she saw.

“I had to break down those assumptions that maybe the head office may have had,” she said, “and where in fact resources and focus should have been placed.”

During her time in Mongolia, she took the time to travel to the far west of the country, a region so remote she had to exit Mongolia into Russia, then through Kazakhstan, and back into Mongolia to reach it. The international aid organizations working there could be counted on one hand. “Red Cross, Plan, Care,” she said. “That’s it.”

Shelina came home from her placements with a reinforced understanding of the importance of listening, people’s generosity, and not making judgements.

Although it’s been more than a decade since her last Cuso placement, Shelina knows the importance of international aid remains. The goal is to “not give handouts but find ways we can support and in turn that they can support and contribute.”

Today, Shelina Gwaduri is a senior fundraising executive in Vancouver, recognized among the city’s top women leaders in 2026. Her work spans major gifts, cultural communities giving, and organizational growth, built over close to two decades in the sector.

Twenty years later, the village she almost couldn’t reach still shapes the work she does today. What she learned from those women outside Ulaanbaatar has never left her: support that builds capacity endures.

Your donation puts a volunteer next to the next business, in the next village too far from the capital for anyone else to reach.

Give today and help build something that outlasts the program that started it.