Project Break Time!!!

OK, I really want to share this with you all, I am so proud of myself today, I finished 634 interviews with women clients. YESSSS!!!! 634. Can you believe it? These six weeks have been crazy, non-stop hectic work, from morning till night!! Time to take a break before doing the rest of them.

My host DAMEN has 48,000 women clients, basically women living on less than $2.00 a day and starting small business enterprise with the help of microloans. When I was asked by the Director to conduct an impact assessment study for empowerment of their clients, I was pretty happy beacuse they gave me full independence in terms of study design and scope. Plus institutional help in terms of a car, driver and 2 full time interns (fresh MBAs) for busy work. The project is very important to the client because they have been thinking for a long time to assess their impact through an independent consultant, and obviously a Clinton School student working free of cost was very ideal! and I was also very excited to get such a strong project and the independence that I have in terms of designing and conducting it.

As I started working, I had to decide what exactly I need to measure and what I want to measure. Looking at the best practices I saw income changes and control over financial resources when people were measuring gender empowerment. They also looked for control over savings and political empowerment, but how could we measure empowerment without looking at what is happening inside the house in terms of gender relations between husband and wife, a woman's control over her leisure time and fertility. We had long discussions with the research department at DAMEN about how empowerment should be measured. The norm in microfinance organizations here seems to be case studies which is pretty detailed but cannot be generalized for thousands of clients. Surveys are time consuming and difficult to conduct for these women who are mostly uneducated.

After much research, debate and thought, I decide to survey 2% of the DAMEN's active clients: 1147 women and planned to measure all the aspects of empowerment. The control of a woman over her time, income, body, fertility, her children's health and education. Her self respect and status in family and community, and the levels of abuse against her.

The best and the most complicated part of the project started with the actual interviews. The questions in the survey are probing and sometimes hard for the women to be specific about. I trained the interns for the interview process and literally we all are learning and improving our skills everyday. The NGO has 20 field offices each one serving many villages and I just finished collection of data from several villages being served by 13 field offices. Just 7 more to go...

This week, I will just stay in the headoffice organizing the piles of data collected and set up the SPSS spreadsheets for them. I will restart the interview process next week, hopefully the heat will subside a little bit by then and I will regain my strength.
Today I will enjoy reading all of your blogs...

...and the temperature was 48 C (118.4 F)

The heat was just unbearable today!!

Cant believe I grew up in this weather, or maybe it is the result of 15 more years of global warming, whatever the reason may be... its extremely hard to bear... especially when I have to walk in the harsh sun for hours, going door to door to meet the women I am interviewing.

Most of the villages I am travelling to do not have streets wide enough for cars. We reach a certain point where the road ends and one has to walk for a while in narrow alleys or through wide fields to get to the right home.

I interviewed over 20 clients today going door to door, which is normally a lot of fun for me, but today the temperature reached 48 C, the water I took with me got finished and there was no bottled water, juice, etc in the small village shops. By the time we got back after hours of walking under the sun, I felt sooooo nauseous, dehydrated, my cheeks burning, couldn't even see clearly. It was a BADDDDD day. And to make it worse tomorrow's forecast is not very pleasing either.. :(:(:(

Walking through the LYCHEE gardens...

Hey guys!!

I have been visiting lot of villages during my field work. But this particular visit was the most exciting. We had to walk through a small Lychee garden (owned by a small scale farmer) to reach a certain village.  A very different experience I must say.

He was kind enough to give me a few bunches on my way back. ;)

What am I doing here?

Well... I am supposed to study the impact of DAMEN, a development NGO providing small loans to 48,000 poor women arouund Lahore, the city I grew up in. They want me to evaluate if their loans are empowering women entrepreneurs alongwith providing an alternate source of income... something I always wanted to do, work with the young women in my homeland after sixteen years of stay in America, understand their lives and help them, definitely sounded like a dream come true!



Gender Empowerment, piece of cake, right! !



Well, not exactly!
Where to start from? Thought I was an expert.
What is empowerment for all these women whom I haven't begun to understand?
What does empowerment mean to them, living a few miles away from my home but decades apart from the life I live? How can I come up with some measures that would work for all these women, whose lives are as different as their problems are, who do not even understand that they have a right to have rights?

Lets start by getting to know them, spending time with them; thus I started travelling to the twenty field offices, each one overseeing the loan process for thousands of women in several villages.

Welcome to Pakistan!!!

Brief Facts About Pakistan

Official Name: Islamic Republic of Pakistan. (created 1947)

Capital: Islamabad.

Area: 796,096-sq. km.

Population: 172.80 million (2008 Census)

Ethnic Composition: 95% Muslims, 5% others

Per Capita Income: US $ 460

Currency: Pak. Rupee

Language: Urdu (National language), English (Official)

Archaeological Sites: Mohenjodaro 2600BC, Harappa 1500 BC, Taxila, Kot Diji, Mehar Garh, and Takht Bahi

Major Cities: Islamabad, Karachi, Lahore, Peshawar, Quetta, Rawalpindi, Hyderabad, Faisalabad and Multan.

Minar-i-Pakistan, the most important national monuments of Pakistan stands at the exact place where the historic Pakistan Resolution was passed in 1940, seven years before the country's birth.  It is one of the few additions to a conglomeration of old monumental structures in Lahore, built by Mughals. The Minar expresses the spirit of that movement. The base of the structure takes the shape of a five point star and is enclosed within crescent shaped pools.