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...