It was the summer of 2014, and while many of my friends were working their way through internships in air-conditioned offices in Milan or Brussels, I was boarding a plane to Erbil, Iraq. Destination: the field office of InterSOS, a humanitarian NGO specialising in emergency relief. I was in the middle of a six-month internship, split between the headquarters in Rome and a field placement in Iraqi Kurdistan. My role? Supporting the design of humanitarian project proposals. A curious mix of Word pages, Excel spreadsheets, field visits, last-minute calls, and a crash course in urgency.
“We were part of a much bigger, urgent story”
In Iraq, InterSOS was running several emergency programmes. One, funded by the FAO, provided food assistance across three refugee camps hosting thousands of Syrian refugees. Another, backed by UNHCR, focused on identifying and supporting vulnerable people within those same camps—women at risk, elderly refugees, and people with disabilities. It was August, the middle of Ramadan, and temperatures regularly hit 45 degrees. Every day brought a new challenge, a new coordination meeting, and often a new proposal deadline.
At the time, I thought I was simply testing the waters of international cooperation. What I didn’t realise was that I was planting the first seeds of what would eventually become my career in project design and innovation consulting.
Fast forward a few years, and here I am, helping startups and SMEs prepare their proposals for Horizon Europe. The context has changed drastically, but the core of the job—the architecture of projects, the storytelling, the problem-solving—has stayed surprisingly similar.
Looking back, I see that my time in Erbil taught me lessons I still draw upon today. Writing proposals for food security in refugee camps and preparing pitch decks for disruptive robotics companies might sound like two completely different planets. But they’re not. The processes, the logic, the pressure, and even the emotional stakes feel strangely familiar. So here’s a personal comparison of two seemingly distant worlds—humanitarian aid and European R&D funding—through the lens of a 25-year-old navigating crisis response in Kurdistan.
“Sometimes we started drafting even before a formal call existed”
Writing in chaos vs. writing in complexity
One thing that struck me in Erbil was how thin the line was between project design and the real world. There was no safety buffer—no detached planning phase where you had time to draft, revise, and rethink. Needs emerged in the morning and had to be addressed by the afternoon. Sometimes we reacted to new calls for proposals, scrambling to meet a five-day deadline. Sometimes we started drafting even before a formal call existed, because we knew a donor was likely to respond.
In Horizon Europe projects, we often spend weeks—or months—refining a concept, developing a theory of change, consulting with partners, aligning the budget with work packages, and anticipating reviewer comments. In Erbil, we barely had time to charge our laptops before drafting began.
It was intense, reactive, and very much rooted in the immediate reality of the people we were trying to support.
Our office was a shared house in the city. The zone was nice and safe, but it came with quirks: a water tank that ran dry if we forgot to fill it, a shaky internet connection that faded at the worst moments, and occasional power outages that reminded us who was really in charge. Yet we lived quite comfortably overall. The occasional blackout or dry faucet didn’t bother us much. In fact, those small disruptions often brought a sense of grounding. They reminded us that we weren’t just writing reports—we were part of a much bigger, urgent story.
That environment shaped how I think about project writing to this day. When you’re physically close to the problem, your writing becomes sharper, more focused, more human. The closer you are to the people you’re trying to help, the clearer your purpose becomes.
Different stakeholders, similar processes
Much of my time in Erbil was spent gathering information: visiting camps, talking with logistics officers, protection staff, community leaders. Their feedback was direct, emotional, often messy—but always authentic. Our job was to capture those needs and translate them into a language donors could understand: structured, evidence-based, goal-oriented.
That part hasn’t changed much. Today, I speak with scientists, startup founders, CTOs, and innovation managers. They might not be managing a refugee camp, but they are often overwhelmed, deeply invested in their work, and eager to make a difference. My role is still the same: to listen carefully, make sense of scattered information, and convert it into a persuasive narrative that speaks the language of evaluators.
The biggest difference? In Erbil, lives were on the line. That added a pressure I haven’t quite felt since. But in both cases, it’s about empathy. It’s about understanding people’s needs, constraints, and motivations—and shaping those into something fundable.
Impact: measured in calories vs. patents
One thing I loved about humanitarian work was how visible and immediate the impact was. You write a good project, secure the funds, and within weeks you see the results. Trucks roll in with food, families collect their rations, and children go to sleep without hunger. It’s real, it’s fast, and it stays with you.
In European R&D, the impact is more abstract. You submit a great proposal, the startup gets funded, and maybe—two or three years later—there’s a new product on the market. Or a breakthrough in clinical trials. Or maybe the company pivots entirely. It’s a slower, less visible kind of change. But no less important.
In both cases, impact needs to be built into the project design. Whether you’re distributing flour or developing nanomaterials, you need to think about who benefits, how, and when. You need a logic. A timeline. A story that moves people.
“It’s about being useful”
Same tools, different missions
It might sound odd, but the basic tools haven’t changed much either. In Erbil, our survival kit was a battered laptop, a local SIM card, and Excel. Today? It’s still Word, PowerPoint, Excel—and a healthy dose of caffeine. Whether you’re preparing a humanitarian response plan or a deep-tech pitch deck, the craft of proposal design remains the same: understand the challenge, define the solution, justify the budget, and tell the story well. The environments may differ—one powered by diesel generators, the other by EU servers—but the core skills are remarkably transferable.
Lessons that stick
There are days when I still think about that summer in Erbil. The energy, the chaos, that common sense of both mission and freedom. I remember sitting in our living room-turned-office, writing a proposal during a blackout with a headlamp. I remember our team’s excitement when the FAO grant came through. I remember learning that good project design is not about ticking boxes—it’s about being useful. Today, when I help a company secure funding for a breakthrough technology, that mindset is still with me. Write with purpose. Design with empathy. Always connect your proposal to the people who need it most. Because whether you’re writing from a refugee camp or a coworking space in Barcelona, the ultimate goal is the same: to turn good ideas into real, meaningful change.