Alumni profile: Caroline Fong, MDE '23

Caroline Fong’s heart never fully left East Africa after she spent two weeks in Kenya on a summer trip in high school. While there, she fell in love with the communities and cultures she interacted with.

A deep commitment to East Africa and the people she met there soon became the guiding motivation for nearly all her academic and professional decisions. She studied Swahili while majoring in mechanical engineering at Stanford, and after graduating spent two years in Tanzania as a secondary school STEM teacher with the Peace Corps. When she arrived at Harvard in 2020 to start the Master in Design Engineering Program (MDE), run jointly by the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and Harvard Graduate School of Design, she knew she wanted to focus her research on addressing challenges in East Africa.

“With my mechanical engineering background, I had a sense of engineering problem solving skills,” she said. “And when I was in East Africa, I felt like I was missing design research skills, the ability to translate my own observations and what people in the community were sharing about the challenges they were having into tangible solutions. Going into MDE I knew that I wanted to develop those user research and design research skills specifically through the lens of social impact in East Africa.”

Fong, MDE '23, is still committed to East Africa two years after leaving SEAS. She’s a Technology Partnerships and Strategy Lead at One Acre Fund, a social enterprise empowering over 5 million smallholder farmers across sub-Saharan Africa with farm supplies, financing, training, and market access In this role, she focuses on fundraising and strategic partnerships, while shaping the organization’s long-term agricultural technology (AgTech) vision and goals.  

“At some point I would love to move back to East Africa and be a little bit closer to the field work, but I definitely feel right now everything I’ve done has led me to this role,” she said. 

After returning from the Peace Corps, Fong spent 18 months in Minneapolis working as an analyst for the Children’s Defense Fund. As she began to research graduate schools, she wanted to tap into both her engineering major and the design courses she took at Stanford. The Harvard MDE program allowed her to do both, while also granting the flexibility to take courses at other schools, such as the Harvard John F. Kennedy School of Government.

“I wanted to still be geographically working in East Africa, but I really missed the problem solving elements of engineering and tech,” she said. “I decided to explore how to lean into more of the engineering and tech aspects while still working in East Africa.”

Fong’s work at One Acre Fund draws on numerous skills she developed through the MDE program. Mapping out a technology strategy requires big picture, systems-level thinking, a concept critical to the MDE program’s educational approach. MDE also taught her how to communicate the needs of a specific stakeholder group, which is essential to fundraising.

“With our Independent Design Engineering Project (IDEP) at Harvard, one of the things that my partner Rebecca Brand and I focused on was how to get a room of people in Cambridge to care about and understand what a smallholder farmer in Kenya is going through,” she said. “That's something that I use in my current job, cultivating partnerships, and how I communicate the successes and challenges that a lot of our clients are working through on a daily basis.”

Skills weren’t the only way the MDE program led Fong to One Acre Fund. Wanting to take a year off during the COVID pandemic, Fong tapped into the MDE alumni network to find a product manager position at SunCulture, an AgTech company in Kenya. When she returned to Harvard and began to plan out her IDEP, MDE’s capstone project, she and Brand brought in Tom Vranken, SunCulture’s Director of Innovation, as an advisor.

“I knew that I didn't want the project to exist in this vacuum of space in Cambridge,” she said. “I decided SunCulture would be the perfect partner for the project - to have access to be out in the field speaking with farmers, many of whom I had built relationships with while working at SunCulture.”

Their project was a digital platform for smallholder farmers in Africa that they called Jua, which in Swahili means “sun” and “to know.” Fong and Brand received an Outstanding Design Engineering Award for their work, which they tested in the field with farmers Fong had met through SunCulture.

“The skills and the things I learned, of course I feel like I'm using them now in my current role and will continue to do so,” she said. “But this role and the previous internship at SunCulture all came through the MDE network. The alumni network across Harvard is just so strong, and I definitely would not be where I am without Harvard and the MDE program.”