Ms Rachel van der Pol - Aqua for All

Ms Rachel van der Pol is a Programme Manager Burkina Faso and Senegal at Aqua for All. 

As a Programme Manager, Rachel’s portfolio is mostly oriented on supporting and developing innovative water and sanitation projects and stimulating entrepreneurship in West-Africa, focusing specifically on Mali, Burkina Faso and Senegal.  

Rachel studied the Master Global Business and Sustainability at Erasmus University in Rotterdam. Before joining Aqua for All, she worked as an intern at the Kenya Climate Innovation Centre. She supported this incubator for climate-tech start-ups with capacity and community building around sustainability, by providing training on sustainability integration for SMEs and organising events for sustainability professionals that stimulated learning.  

Further, through her work as Program Manager at the UN Global Compact Network Netherlands, she developed strong strategy planning and relationship-building skills, as she worked on engaging many different private and public stakeholders to achieve the SDGs. Rachel gained knowledge on the reality of starting an entrepreneurial business in the context of a developing country and learned about innovative ways of financing during her participation in the New Business Challenge Ghana, an initiative of the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs and travelled through Uganda, Rwanda, Tanzania and Mozambique. 

As an enthusiastic and energetic, result-oriented young professional, Rachel embraces every challenge with a can-do attitude and is fully committed to contributing to sustainable business development in the WASH sector in West-Africa.