Christine Buesser

User Name: Christine.Buesser
Organization/Affiliation: Graduate of the Harvard Kennedy School with the ‘Water Diplomacy’ course taken at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Location: Switzerland

About Me

I left Switzerland more than 15 years ago to initially pursue an undergraduate degree in Business Administration at Babson College in Wellesley, MA. This served as a foundation for my three-year stint as investment banker in New York City before joining Medicins Sans Frontieres (MSF/ Doctors Without Borders) in 2007. Since then I have been leading MSF's projects and missions in North Sudan, DRC, Haiti and Pakistan. In June 2013, I went back to school to pursue a 1-year graduate degree in Public Administration at the Harvard Kennedy School in Cambridge, MA.

While being enrolled at the Harvard Kennedy School, I was able to take classes at other universities in the Boston area. Hence I decided to take a course called ‘Water Diplomacy’ [1] with Professor Larry Susskind at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) during the 2014 spring semester. For my final assignment, I had to present and write up a case that had to do with a complex water management problem. Given the fact that I was in Israel and the State of Palestine (West Bank) on a Harvard student-led Spring break trek in March 2014, I decided to write the water management case about Gaza to shed light on the profound complexity and difficulty of getting not only enough but also quality water to the Gazan people.