Between October 2025 and January 2026, Catherine Lion, a staff member of urbaMonde France, worked alongside urbaSEN, our partner in Senegal, to support the structuring of its administrative and financial tools.
This mission, rooted in a dynamic of collaboration and mutual learning between urbaMonde and urbaSEN, contributes to strengthening the foundations needed for the development of their projects and to supporting locally led housing initiatives.
Structuring archives to support daily work
Over the years, urbaSEN has accumulated a large number of documents related to its projects, partnerships, and internal management. During this support mission, the teams worked together to establish a more structured archiving system, facilitating access to information on past projects, securing sensitive documents, and improving the monitoring of ongoing activities.
This work, often invisible, nevertheless plays an essential role: it enables the retrace of project history, meets the requirements of financial partners, and ensures continuity in daily operations.
Developing adapted financial monitoring tools
The mission also provided an opportunity to collaborate with the administrative team on budget monitoring tools in order to better track expenses by project, facilitate the preparation of financial reports, and obtain a comprehensive overview of budgets, thereby supporting informed decision-making.
This work was carried out daily in close collaboration with the Administrative and Financial Director, the accountant, and the accounting assistant, ensuring that the tools reflected the organisation’s needs and practices.
A shared learning process
Beyond the tools themselves, the mission created space for collective reflection on administrative practices. Training and exchange sessions enabled the team to progressively take ownership of the new tools and adapt them to their needs.
The objective was not only to introduce tools, but also to contribute to sustainable practices fully integrated into the organization’s functioning, supporting the continuation of the partnership between urbaSEN and urbaMonde, including their day-to-day remote collaboration.
Supporting long-term development
As projects continue to grow, having solid administrative tools and clear procedures becomes essential to ensure their monitoring, transparency, and sustainability.
This mission helped consolidate key aspects of internal operations and highlighted how administrative work, often discreet, is a fundamental pillar of projects led by local organisations.
For Catherine, this mission was also her first experience in Africa and in Senegal. From the outset, the mission was designed to remain flexible in duration in order to avoid a “consultancy” approach. Catherine wanted to take the time to listen, understand, share, and adapt to the constraints and priorities of urbaSEN and its administrative team. Beyond the administrative and financial aspects, this experience became a true immersion, allowing her to discover African ways of working — including beyond urbaSEN itself — which she found deeply inspiring on both a human and personal level.
