Author: Rhea Solomon
Spend enough time at university, and building a résumé starts to feel like a second degree. Join a committee. Find an internship. Gain work experience. For students hoping to work in international development, the pressure comes with an appealing promise: prepare yourself now, and one day you can help address inequality. But what happens when preparing to fight inequality requires being able to afford it?
What is the price of experience? An unpaid internship costs more than a missing salary. There is rent, transportation, and the income someone gives up by turning down paid work. International placements can add flights and insurance. Extracurricular leadership has a price, too: hours that another student needs for a shift.
A 2025 Sutton Trust report found that 55% of middle-class graduates surveyed in Britain had completed an internship, compared with 36% of working-class graduates (Sutton Trust, 2025). Among unpaid interns, 40% received financial support from parents (Sutton Trust, 2025). These are British, cross-sector findings, but they expose a problem development organizations should recognize: access to experience is shaped by access to financial support.
The international development sector itself embodies this issue. United Nations Secretariat internships are unpaid, with interns or sponsoring institutions responsible for travel, accommodation, insurance, and living expenses (United Nations, n.d.). An opportunity can frame itself as inclusive, open to all applicants, while still remaining unaffordable to accept. It need not be this way: other UN bodies, including UNDP, the World Food Programme, UN Women and the International Labour Organization, already pay their interns a stipend.
The gap widens quietly. One student spends the summer collecting references; another collects enough shifts to afford tuition, food and rent in September. The first experience becomes a line on a résumé; the second keeps a life together. Months later, an application places them side by side, and the money that separated their choices disappears from view. What remains looks like a difference in ambition.
This happens because the sector rewards costly signals: credentials whose value comes partly from being expensive to acquire. An unpaid internship certifies competence, but it also certifies that someone could afford to work for free.
This matters beyond fairness in hiring, because selection is not neutral to output. The people an organization hires go on to decide which problems it sees, whose explanations it trusts, and what it counts as a workable solution. A filter for the ability to work without pay shapes the work itself, through at least three routes.
The first is problem definition. Someone who has never had to choose between a placement and rent is less likely to see time, cash flow and risk as the binding constraints in other people's lives. Programmes designed from that position can quietly assume that participants can absorb the very costs that filtered out the applicants: an unpaid training day, a trip to a registration office, a form that needs a fixed address.
The second is geography. The filter sorts by country as well as by class. An unpaid placement in New York or Geneva is hardest to accept for applicants from low-income states, and UN data have shown that roughly half of Secretariat interns come from just seven countries, most of them high-income. A sector meant to serve the Global South ends up recruiting much of its entry-level talent from the Global North.
The third is reproduction. Today's interns become tomorrow's hiring managers and programme officers. They set the next round's criteria, usually by reference to the path that worked for them. Left alone, the filter compounds rather than fades.
The same logic reaches far beyond student hiring. Peace Direct's Time to Decolonize Aid reports that development practices can privilege Western knowledge systems while devaluing local expertise (Peace Direct, 2021). A Western degree and an unpaid placement work alike: each is rewarded partly for what it costs to obtain. Financial exclusion among students and the marginalization of local practitioners are distinct problems, but they share this root; they meet wherever institutions recognize prestigious credentials more readily than knowledge gained through organizing, navigating services, or sustaining communities.
The pattern appears in funding as well as hiring. In 2016, donors and aid agencies signed the Grand Bargain, committing to route 25% of humanitarian funding to local and national responders as directly as possible. By 2025, direct funding to those actors stood at 4.3%.
That knowledge is not decorative. In an experiment across 640 Indonesian villages, economists Vivi Alatas, Abhijit Banerjee, Rema Hanna, Benjamin Olken and Julia Tobias compared methods of identifying households for assistance (Alatas et al., 2012). Community selection produced higher satisfaction and reflected a different understanding of poverty. It performed somewhat worse against a consumption-based poverty measure, an important qualification, but revealed that residents and technical assessments did not define need identically. This does not mean hardship automatically makes someone an expert, or that a Canadian student's financial struggles represent another community's experience. It means development loses something when people facing exclusion cannot help define the questions.
Changing this means answering each route. Paid entry routes, with support provided before placement costs arise, widen who can get in, across both class and country. Recruitment that values paid work and caregiving alongside formal leadership breaks the cycle in which each cohort hires in its own image. And giving local practitioners authority over budgets and programme design places problem definition with the people who live the problem. Universities can fund participation; development organizations can fund, and cede decisions.
An impressive résumé can reflect real commitment. We should also ask what made it possible, and what another applicant had to carry instead.
Citations
Alatas, V., Banerjee, A., Hanna, R., Olken, B. A., & Tobias, J. (2012). Targeting the poor: Evidence from a field experiment in Indonesia. American Economic Review, 102(4), 1206–1240. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.102.4.1206
Peace Direct. (2021). Time to decolonise aid: Insights and lessons from a global consultation. https://www.peacedirect.org/publications/timetodecoloniseaid/
Sutton Trust. (2025). Unpaid and underpaid internships: Access to internships for graduates. https://www.suttontrust.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Unpaid-and-Underpaid-Internships.pdf
United Nations. (n.d.). #Work4UN: UN interns. https://www.un.org/en/academic-impact/work4un-un-interns