Today is my last day at the office! I'm leaving for my first field visit tomorrow to a community that is not very far from Accra called Kasseh. Our work of the past two weeks has resulted in a 20 pages long survey full of questions regarding the centers and the entrepreneurs that we'll be filling up during our visits. The plan is to spend one week at each community understanding the operations of the RBCs and life in general. I must confess that although I'm really excited, I'm a little nervous of traveling by myself. However, my experience with tro-tro's (buses) so far has shown me that I don't even need to ask people which one to take; they just look at me, ask me where I'm going and walk me to the right tro-tro! I'm not sure how much access to the internet I will have and I don't think I'll be back in Accra until at least the end of June, but I'll try to keep you updated on my travels and findings (and any funny annecdotes too because I'm sure there will be a few!)
Take care and hope to hear from you soon!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Hey Andrea!
Your blog is simply fantastic!! I hope you are having a great experience so far in the different communities and that your independent travel is going well ;) Its awesome that you have the chance to visit a number of communities. Since we are on the same time zone (i think) I will try skype-calling you sometime in the next week or so!
- What have you guys developed in terms of a plan of how to distill the results from the surveys and turn them into a comprehensible, useful tool when you return to Accra?
- Did you find it hard to familarize yourselves with what a successful RBC could look like/how to assess them? Do you think there are any implicit assumptions in that?
- Will it be challenging to separate your own ideas/conceptions about the project and its potential for success & its challenges when you are conducting interviews and evaluating the responses?
Thats all I have for now, but hopefully we can chat sometime soon! Take care my dear!
Anna
Hey Anna! Thanks for the great questions!
As far as the surveys go we will be compiling them into a report for KITE and discussing our observations with Daniel, the project manager for e-CARE as the summer goes by. Heather was wondering why I don't have a "counterpart" since it is standard practice for JF to work together with someone from the partner organization. Officially I am working with Daniel although he is not travelling with me or any of us to the different centers. One of my challenges for the next month is to find a good way of sharing my observtions and questions with other people at KITE and discuss the process that I used at each center in trying to understand how it is doing and what type of support they need. It is a little hard because I will be out of the office for the most part and no one benefits from long boring reports. I think that Daniel would benefit a lot from conducting the surveys with us but the whole reason why the project has had so little oversight is because KITE doesn't have a lot of staff to be in the field.
We have left 3 weeks at the end of the summer to work on some tools with KITE including a new mechanized selection criteria for future entrepreneurs and training material that they could find useful when training the new batch of entrepreneurs. Most importantly, KITE is interested in practical recommendations that they can add to the new project phase.
While making the survey we based most of our questions and indicators on the project's objectives which I wrote about in the other post. In general the questions deal with the entrepreneur's skills and attitudes, the solar energy component, any additional services that the centres are providing and the community's perspective on the whether it is meeting its ITC and other needs. I think the biggest assumption here is that we are treating the centers as businesses and that traditional good business indicators like profit and market of products will give us a good idea of its performance. We tried to make the survey open enough so that we can make subjective observations too. Another big assumption is that the centers were set up in the conditions that they are supposed to according to the plan.
Separating my own ideas and the project's potential will probably be one of the hardest things, you are right! Already at the two centers I found it hard to be objective and separate my logical observations with my emotional connection with the people who work there and could benefit from it. In MBTI terms I'm finding it hard to balance my feeler and my thinker sides!
I could probably talk more about this but I'll keep it short. Hopefully we'll get to talk more this weekend!
Please keep the questions coming!
Post a Comment