Empower/IGL 2009: Notes from the Field

I Carried the Watermelon

2009-08-29T06:46:00.000-07:00

Actually, it was stones. Up a mountain.

The last Saturday of every month, Rwandan community members dedicate their mornings to Umuganda, or Travaux Communitaire. It’s a pretty incredible concept – the able-bodied members of a nation coming together on a monthly basis to improve the community. The flipside for visitors or others not participating is that public and private services are unavailable until after noon on umuganda days.

In Byumba, my current field location, this month’s umuganda was dedicated to providing materials for the foundations of a new classroom. Everyone in the umudugudu (the neighborhood), including me, went to a nearby site where men were hammering away stone from the mountain, and carried the stones up a steep incline to the school.

Here’s me on my first trip.

I was not looking so cavalier when I got back to the top of the mountain. The second time around, I chose a stone that was twice as big -- and walked twice as slowly -- after seeing what the others were transporting.

For Rwanda's Coffee Farmers, Radios Can Save Lives

2009-08-18T14:19:00.000-07:00

Michelle, Emily, and I just completed our two-month Empower internship at the Freeplay Foundation, a London-based NGO that distributes solar-powered Lifeline radios to some of the most vulnerable populations in sub-Saharan Africa.

While the Freeplay Foundation distributes its radios in 14 countries, I was particularly impressed by their Coffee Lifeline project that provides Rwandan coffee farmers with radio access. Coffee Lifeline demonstrates just how much of a positive impact information access can have on poor communities.

A coffee farmer listening to her radio while harvesting coffee

While coffee farming represents more than half of the Rwanda’s export income, many of Rwanda’s 500,000 farmers live in poverty because they are unable to access information needed to best grow their crops, including weather reports, news on farming techniques, and the world market price for coffee. Without the necessary information to produce better coffee, farmers cannot afford to feed their families or send their children to school.

A group of farmers listening to a coffee-washing lesson on the radio

Through the Coffee Lifeline project that distributes radios to farmers, today more than 35,000 Rwandan farmers have radio access and can tune into Imbere Heza, a radio program co-created by the Freeplay Foundation. Each month, more than 200,000 coffee farmers tune into the program to listen to important information, including the daily market price for coffee, how to harvest better quality coffee, how to join coffee cooperatives, and health lessons for their families. Thanks to Imbere Heza, many farming communities that once suffered are now prospering. They are able to harvest better quality coffee and sell it at a better price.

While Coffee Lifeline is just one project, it illustrates how far information access can go in helping improve the quality of life for the poor. In the future, the Freeplay Foundation hopes to expand the Coffee Lifeline model into other coffee growing countries in the world.

Limited Resource

2009-08-08T07:03:00.000-07:00

In many of my interviews with public officials, a common concept will eventually come up: In Rwanda, when you speak of land, you speak of agriculture. One cannot discuss land ownership without discussing agriculture. The country’s economy is heavily dominated by its agricultural sector, but with an already high population density and growing population, there isn’t any excess land lying about.

Hence the focus on land reform, and the need to be as productive as possible with every bit of land. Despite this, there are some areas of the country where the land remains unused. In contrast, there are some areas where the land appears to be used to its fullest possible extent.

One notices it almost instantly. As soon as you are outside Kigali, the landscape shifts to farmland. It seems that every inch of land is cultivated.

In several of the areas I've visited, the land is cultivated right up to the road, and houses are given only as much clearing as necessary.

Seeing this really underscores how crucial an effective and appropriate land policy is here.

Fighting Energy-Poverty One Girl at a Time

2009-08-06T03:50:00.000-07:00

Me, Emily, and Gillian at the Freeplay Foundation Office with Lifeline Radios

It’s a surreal feeling sitting in London fighting the monotony of reading project proposals and budgets, while knowing that it will ultimately be helping adolescent girls in Burundi. Until recently I didn’t know much about Burundi other than as the country on the map of East Africa. But since working at the Freeplay Foundation I have learned quite a bit about Burundi—it’s political history, cultural practices, and systemic problems.

Freeplay Foundation's Solar-Powered and Wind-Up "Lifeline Radio"--the first radio ever created for humanitarian use.

The Freeplay Foundation is an international NGO which works to alleviate "enegy-poverty" through the distribution of clean energy technologies, such as wind-up and solar powered flashlights and radios. During my internship in London, with Gillian and Emily, I have worked closely with the Freeplay Foundation’s Project Manager. It has been a whirlwind experience, from reporting directly to the Foundation’s CEO to brainstorming potential project ideas to adjusting to the surprisingly numerous cultural differences (who knew a dish called “Bangers and Mash” could be so delicious?).

A picture from a Burundian Village Savings and Loan Group Meeting in Gitega.

One of my favorite projects so far has been the Burundi project, where the Freeplay Foundation is working with other international and local Burundian NGOs to help adolescent girls create savings and loans groups and learn microfinance skills. My favorite part of the project is watching it evolve through various stages from an initial proposal, to a discussion at a partner meeting, and ultimately an implemented project which will help the lives of 20,000 girls. I look forward to watching it develop and how the Freeplay Foundation’s contribution will impact the lives of the girls.

Masks and hand sanitizer at the ready: Encounters with A H1N1

2009-07-31T21:25:00.000-07:00

One other exciting event that occurred during my internship: A positive case of A H1N1 was discovered in an American tourist in Las Salinas on June 16, 2009. In response to this finding, we, the staff at the clinic, had to manage the situation in order to ensure that the patient had not infected others in his hotel or anyone in the community. Since I speak both English and Spanish, I served as an interpreter when the team was visiting the hotel of the patient. Additionally, with my training as an emergency medical technician, was able to take down necessary health-related information. I also visited individual houses with my supervisor to notify the population of the positive case and to educate them on prevention methods.

As we were going around to other hotels, we discovered that none of them had gotten wind of this news. This situation needed to be rectified immediately, as the tourism industry is the interface with the most potencial for the transmission of the virus. A) Tourists could bring the virus into the community and possible infect the workers at the hotel, who are mostly locals. B) If there were a local case (for example, if someone got infected whilst traveling from Managua, where a majority of the cases have been), they could likewise transmit the disease to tourists. Thus, I traveled with Ministry of Health officials to give the same public health workshops and to fortify the communication between the clinic and the hotels (with my project mini fund, we were able to buy a cell phone for the clinic - before, there was no way for people to contact the health workers)
The Ministry of Health also received donations of flu vaccines from the government of Venezuela, which were designated for the teachers. As we gave out these vaccinations, it was interesting to hear the mixed emotions towards this donation - a cross between relief for this preventative measure (although this vaccine is not specifically for A H1N1, it was meant to fortify the immune system against the disease) and the skepticism of the political motives for this donation.

Whilst it was very exciting to work on the frontlines against this epidemic, this work proved extremely challenging for a variety of reasons; The A H1N1 case was discovered at end of the month, when the clinic has to make all sorts of reports... so although the ministry of health thought that visiting the other hotels to spread this news was a good idea, they refused to provide transportation for us to go to these hotels (and these hotels were about 40 minutes drive from our clinic) Therefore I had to look to other sources of support. I ended up collaborating with a private clinic on this undertaking, but the contact we had there acted as if it were only a project that concerned the PUBLIC clinic, even though wouldn't it make sense to think of it as public health work that is in the interest of everyone? In any case, we have to make the best of the resources that we can access and not dwell on the things that we lack, which has been an invaluable lesson.

Baby steps in improving obstetrical health

2009-07-31T20:46:00.000-07:00

Here I am, looking back on my 2-month internship with the Foundation for Sustainable Development in the rural community of Las Salinas in Southwestern Nicaragua. My internet access these past two months had been fickle and flighty at best, so I had not been able to update this blog until now.
For this internship, I was working at a public clinic which is staffed by one doctor and two nurses, and is in custody of five communities (some 4,000 people). the provider:patient ratio is quite staggering... on top of the fact that we do not always have the medicines that we need - we did not have acetaminophen for a good month and a half, which is sobering, considering fever is one of the most common afflictions in the community. During my last week here, a 23-day-old baby girl died of high fever in her home in the middle of the night - there were other complications, as she was born with sepsis - but even if she HAD been brought to the clinic, we wouldn't have had the medication to treat her. The community is a two-hour bus ride away from the nearest hospital, and the roads are really horrible, especially in invierno, or the rainy season, (which started about the time I arrived). The locals here tell me that in October and November, the roads are impassable; the water levels get so high that some have to leave their homes in search of higher ground (not to mention that the water is contaminated by all the garbage that is strewn all over the place - there is no garbage collection system, nor a landfill). A plethora of other problems plague the community - they only receive 8 hours of running water every day (on some days, there is no running water in the clinic)

In addition to helping with the daily functions of the clinic, I am pursuing a project called “Plan de Parto,” which aims to reduce the incidence of maternal and infant mortality in the community. This is an extremely important topic, as well over 80% of pregnant women in the communities have at least one or two risk factors for pregnancy complications (e.g. mothers younger than 19 or older than 35, high blood pressure, lack of access to health care facilities). We mobilized community members to form committees that oversee the organization of various activities concerning the health of pregnant women in the community. They are responsible for conducting a census of all the pregnant women in their respective communities and creating a map, so that local community health workers and midwives know exactly where the pregnant women live, in case of an emergency. We held educational workshops on nutrition during pregnancy, possible complications during childbirth, breastfeeding etc. I thought it would be more engaging to couple the health lectures with more tactile activities such as making our own healthy refreshments that were rich in the nutrients we had discussed during the workshop.

We also wrote a letter to the municipal office of the Ministry of Health in Tola to request visits from Ob/Gyns to give consults to the pregnant women in the community at least once every two months. Without this service, most women go without sonograms and other “standard” prenatal care procedures – they can get these at private clinics, but this expenditure is well out of the reach of almost all women in the community.
In order to make the activities of these committees sustainable, we have also been holding handicraft sessions, where the women share their skills in knitting, crocheting, embroidering and other crafts. Even before my internship ended, we were already selling these products in the community, and we hope to extend our market to local fairs and nearby hotels in order to generate a fund that will fund future activities of a similar nature (buying materials, etc) and serve as an emergency fund, in the case that a pregnant women needed to go to the hospital in Rivas but did not have the economic means to do so.

To integrate other community members into this endeavour, I also created a sign up list where people who could provide transport to the clinic/hospital or girls who could help out with domestic chores during the last trimester of the women's pregnancies could put down their contact information. Ideally, this would also generate some employment within the community..
All in all, I hope that these activities can build community and systems of information sharing between the people of all these different communities through the activities of "Plan de Parto"

Compiling our final report in New Delhi

2009-07-26T11:03:00.000-07:00

Coming back from Jaipur, to be completely honest, I really did not think our sample size of some 100+ interviews was going to be enough to create a solid report and analysis. I'm now not entirely sure what made me so pessimistic then about how the final report would shape up, because we certainly couldn't have conducted more interviews than we managed within the time frame we had been given and well......100 isn't exactly a small number for the amount of questions we asked each participant.

Happily however I was completely and utterly wrong. Our analysis and tabulation is showing the numbers we recorded for all our indicators are quite strong and relevant to the circumstances and conditions we witnessed while being out on the field. Of course, there will always be regrets about other indicators we should have incorporated in our study - but on the whole now that I'm actually getting a sense of the data we managed to gather and its implications for the field operations of Sahayata....lets just say I'm really really looking forward to completing and presenting our final report!

Rukoma

2009-07-25T04:24:00.000-07:00

As this is my first blog entry here (which is cross-posted to my personal blog), I thought I’d give a bit of an introduction. I am in Rwanda, working with an organization called SEVOTA, to research gender and land issues. My work has me doing some legal research and interviews in Kigali, as well as interviews out in the countryside. I’m currently spending about 3 weeks in Rukoma, where SEVOTA has its most active office.

I’ve been settling into my temporary home in Rukoma, which is vastly different from Kigali. Of course, one always expects the country to be different from the city. And I am truly in the country. Out here, electricity and running water are precious, and for the most part, nonexistent. The hospital and some connected guest houses have electricity all day, it seems. The house in which I’m staying has a few hours of electricity each night, provided by a solar-powered generator. We don’t have running water, but it seems that at least some places connected to the hospital do. Cellular signal, however, is everywhere. Members of the community often visit our house or the hospital to charge their phones.

My cellphone has attained a level of importance that it never had before, as it is my only easily available connection to the rest of the world. I have no newspapers, television or internet access out there. Internet access comes on those few days when I am in Kigali or another city.

As with most of Rwanda, Rukoma is an agricultual community, and the land is used primarily for cultivation. The few with enough land to cultivate produce for commerce tend to grow bananas. Other plants I’ve seen are sweet potatos and something they tell me is used to make beer.

In addition to the need for more land, I’ve been hearing quite a bit from the people here that they would like to learn modern farming techniques. Much of the cultivation I’ve seen here is done manually, with scythe-like tools.

The people in Rukoma are getting used to me (it helps that there’s another American intern and a peace corps volunteer in the village), although they are a bit perplexed as to why I do things like visit farmland and take pictures of the Wednesday market.

One woman farmer did suggest that I use this time to act as an ambassador to the U.S., and let everyone at home know that Rwandan women work very hard, but are still very poor.

Loans for women aren't always used by women

2009-07-15T04:04:00.000-07:00

The most obvious trade off between a for-profit microfinance model and the NGO model can be seen directly in the picture below. Speaking in ideal terms, an NGO model would always be motivated by the social impact of every loan and therefore hand out the money where it is most needed. A for-profit model, on the other hand, being a money churning machine pushed by volumes will attempt to reach out to the largest number of reliable clients it can. The social impact in the latter's case is almost always incidental and never the primary motive.

The women of the house took out loans from Sahayata in order to enable this family business to expand

Even though Sahayata's loans are given out strictly to women, the loan (mostly in cases of joint families which run a single business) is actually used up by the elders or the men of the house for the family business. One of the down sides of a for profit model is exactly this - no premium is ever actually placed on empowering the woman, the priority lies in collecting back the loan with interest. Of course its hard to argue that the family (and consequentially the woman herself) didn't benefit from the loan given out.

Rural vs. Urban Microfinance

2009-07-09T08:58:00.000-07:00

One of the things I'm constantly aware of while conducting our study in Jaipur is how different and affected the responses we recieve are, purely because of the fact that all our respondants are located in, or near the city. Almost all of the small amounts of money injected into the businesses of these women, gets used up efficiently by the local markets that provide cheap resources and at the smae time supply a seemingly inexhaustible demand for all the little goods these women produce. Given the proximity and strength of these urban markets (for both resources and finished goods), one can't help but wonder how women in more remote rural areas with similar small scale business models fare. Not a single respondant in our survey has failed to increase their savings with these relatively modest loans.

In remote rural areas, where microfinance is traditionally supposed to work in India I suspect, the whole process of providing or strengthening the links these small scale businesses have with their respective markets, is an important dimension of running a successful microfinance enterprise that seems to be missing from such a urbane setting. If anything, in the cities, microfinance firms only need to be worried about and keep a look out for market saturation in the future - which is probably the only thing that could threaten the livelihood of these women (who themselves think taking out bigger loans would allow them to buy more raw materials, produce more goods and consequently make more money - the case for which they vehemently make when they mistakenly assume us interns have any influence on the loan sizes they recieve)

Of course this discussion only relates to women who actually used the money for their own businesses, rather than the family or husband's work, and there are plenty of cases of the latter. In a for-profit microfinance enterprise, it hardly matters who uses the money as long as the installments are paid on time. But thats a subject worthy of entire new blog post (if not an entire paper).

PS: I was planning on uploading some pics on the only rural outpost of Sahayata we managed to visit, but unfortunatley this computer isn't letting me reduce the gigantic image size or upload such a big file...but more intersting pictures are on there way soon when I head back home to Delhi this weekend.

News from hot Delhi - Erika (Kika) Tabacniks

2009-07-09T01:36:00.000-07:00

Impressive how we get used to different lifestyles fast. The first days in India were filled with surprises and mixed feelings. Living here has been full of ups and downs, very high ups and extremely low downs. The final result, though, so far, has been of an enriching and exciting experience. Having the opportunity to share a house with 3 other Fletcherites has certainly added to the experience.

We live in New Delhi, about 1-3 hours (depending on the means of transportation) away from Gurgaon, new financial center in the state of Haryana. CapitalConnect is a small company that has taken up 3 interns for the summer to spread the word about it and implement a marketing strategy. It is an online marketplace that allows social enterprises, institutional lenders, and investors worldwide to communicate with one another, initiate financial transactions, and analyze market trends. Somewhat less frenetic than my previous jobs. I like it.

With the intention of getting closer to the distant ones, I am keeping another blog (http://kika123.blogspot.com/) with posts and photos of my adventures and daily activities. Trying to show the magic and the essence of India, I've also made some videos http://www.youtube.com/erikat99. My experience here has caught the attention of a reporter, who wrote an article for a Brazilian magazine. Apologies as they are all in Portuguese.

As I approach the middle of my internship, the same mixed feelings play in my head. I must confess, though, that I miss the cold weather of tranquil Medford.

Checking in from Sahayata Microfinance

2009-07-02T07:34:00.000-07:00

I’m in middle of the third week of my stint at Sahayata Microfinance in Jaipur in India. Sahayata Microfinance is probably the most well established MFI running in the state of Rajasthan right now. My internship involves two main projects. The first (the one I’m more excited about) is conducting a study of the social impact of the loans given out by Sahayata. This project has given me access to pretty much all of the branches of Sahayata in Jaipur (they have 4 apart from their regional office), and lets me accompany FCOs out on their trips to meet women receiving loans and interview them. The second project (that chains me to the desk in the evenings) involves conducting a competition scan of MFIs operating in the states that Sahayata is planning to expand its operations.

The interesting thing that you pick up almost immediately while working at this organization is that because its been set up and is being run by people with decades of experience in the professional banking sector, there is a considerable amount of attention paid towards developing efficient work practices and procedures. In a volume driven industry like microfinance, setting up efficient and scalable practices seems pretty much key to success. The training and screening process for Field Collection Officers (FCOs) itself has such an obvious impact on the quality of work that is carried out on the field.

So far the experience has been pretty much amazing. I’m learning an incredible amount about how microfinance works on the ground level. More pictures and stories on that to follow:)

Orientation Meeting

2009-05-03T15:21:00.000-07:00

The Empower Orientation meeting will take place Tuesday, May 5th, from 6 to 7 at the IGL! See you all there!

Welcome!

2009-04-13T13:31:00.000-07:00

This website will host blog entries, photos, stories and more from the participants in the Summer 2009 Empower Program (an initiative of the Tufts Institute for Global Leadership). Please check back soon for the first entries from our program participants.