BwB Skillanthropist Profile: Kacper Nowicki

As part of our 5th Year Anniversary Celebration, Bankers without Borders is recognizing some of our outstanding volunteers whose commitment and dedication helps us fulfill our mission to connect the world's poor to their potential.

Kacper Nowicki joined Google in January 2007, as one of the first people in the Polish Engineering office. He is currently working on Google Infrastructure as an Engineering Director, leading teams in Warsaw and Krakow and collaborating with peers in the United States. Kacper graduated in Experimental Physics, and in his pre-Google life, he worked as a consultant in Poland and the U.S., set up his own companies, including Zambeel Inc. in Silicon Valley, CA, and long, long ago started the first Polish web server. He is avid cyclist and spends his free time outdoors traveling, skiing, running, sailing.

This spring, Kacper used his considerable expertise to help Grameen Foundation's Mobile Technology for Community Health (MOTECH) initiative streamline data management processes to improve monitoring and evaluation capabilities. Along with a team of fellow Google employee volunteers, Kacper traveled to Ghana to meet with MOTECH staff and develop a technical infrastructure that will ultimately help community health workers to more easily identify women and newborns in their area in need of healthcare services, and better monitor their health outcomes and evaluate the program’s effectiveness.

Kacper found his Bankers without Borders volunteer experience both rewarding. “Bankers Without Borders very effectively facilitated the volunteer project I participated in. They managed to match prior experience to the needs of the NGO on the ground, significantly increasing the impact we could have in a short time we were in Ghana,” he said. “[Bankers without Borders Regional Program Officer] Eve Mungai and the rest of the staff were very professional and fantastically navigated the organizational chaos that one can sometimes encounter in Sub-Saharan Africa.”

MOTECH was equally impressed. “Our project is not easy and [Kacper] attacked it eagerly and intelligently. The Google team has been quite flexible in terms of coming up with solutions and re-working them when obstacles have arisen,” said Anita Moorthy, a project manager at MOTECH who worked closely with the volunteers. “Additionally, they have been great in terms of sharing knowledge with our IT staff on technology matters and I can see that they've really appreciated that. They are definitely adding value”.