Reflections

Well blog buddies, I have failed miserably at updating the blog weekly. But I'm going to give you a brief overview what happened the past three weeks.

Our final week in Belize was spent finishing up our surveys, working on the final presentation, and our three service projects (building a chicken coup, a fast food hut, and a business renovation). After a few days of consistent work, then polishing through the night, we presented the final presentation to B.E.S.T. Among other recommendations, we suggested they seek partnerships with leading MFI's or seek capital from outside sources, like ACCION International. We concluded, with the help of our professor, that B.E.S.T. was financially unsustainable and, should they not reevaluate their methods for acquiring capital, and improving their repayment rate, they will most likely be out of business within 2 years. One of our initial objectives was to develop an impact assessment tool, which we did using industry best practices, but when we were supposed to start using it in the field, best deemed it unsuitable, and instead provided us with their own survey, which at best gave a coarse overview of their performance, NOT impact. The main challenge when analyzing the data, was trying to extract pertinent data from an amateur survey that measure something else. After many frustrating hours of analyzing, we were able to extract a few correlations. On a separate observation based analysis, we concluded that best was trying to act as a bank, but the people running it weren't bankers. So while they are well intentioned, they're practices are not that of a microfinance institution truly dedicated to the mission of poverty elimination.

The following Sunday we flew to the much cooler Dominican Republic. After a mere 4.5 hours of sleep we were up again off to INTEC our partner university in the DR. After a brief introduction, and a quick lecture, we separated into groups. With the help of Esperanz's director of impact measurement. We tweaked our survey for Esperanza to fit their specific needs. In the DR our objective was to measure the effectiveness of Esperanza's business training model, and recommend improvements we felt could be easily implemented and would be effective over the short, and long term. Over the course of our 8 days in the field we were able to perform 208 valid surveys, surpassing the number of surveys last year's group did in 3 weeks! How did we accomplish such a feat? We worked from 6:30am until 7:30pm, everyday. A major problem with the Belize program was communication between the program organizers and the students, and people feeling as if the biweekly "reflections" were ineffective, and a total waste of time seeing as they inevitable became a 2 hour long complaining/venting session. In the DR, our professor eliminated the reflection sessions, dumped the "team leaders" and instead held daily guided reflection sessions pertaining to what happened in the field, and how that proved, disproved, or made a certain point apparent. While we usually returned to the hotel around 9pm the extra time spent with the professor was surely worth the lack of sleep and ensuing fatigue.

In belize, because there wasn't much time in the end to do the presentation, a small group put the entire project together, while the rest worked on service projects, excluding people who wanted to participate, creating a fissure within the group (thankfully we had a day and a half a beach resort to reset before DR !). In the DR our professor made it explicitly clear that he wanted this presentation to be representative of the work of the group, and that everyone needed to participate in some fashion. That being said he made it clear that nobody was to be working on every single part. He told us that we had to divide the work up among the group and trust that everyone pulled their own weight to create a cohesive and effective presentation. I decided to research industry best practices on innovative training methods that were adaptive to the demographic they were training. I found that Fonkozé's, Haiti's largest MFI, tiered training model most effective. In the Fonkozé model, borrowers are divided into groups first by literacy, then by whether or not they were in a rural or urban area. Illiterate and enumerate borrowers were taught the basics of reading and writing through games, songs, and other interactive techniques. Once a borrower graduates to the next level, they are taught the essential business concepts and practices, like profit vs. revenue, how to price their products, and the importance of record keeping. The most distinguishable feature of Fonkozé's training model is it is usually taught by successful borrowers, a sort of peer-to-peer model, eliminating the hierarchy between "stupid" adult students, and "smart, elitist" teachers, that oftentimes inhibits the effectiveness of the training session.
This presentation was extremely successful making it obvious how consistent and methodical planning, can turn a large disorganized clash of opinions into a high performing team working in seamless harmony toward a common goal.

The program is officially over, and as I draft this post by the seaside, waiting for my ride to take to me to the airport to arrive, I can only think of just how privileged I am, and the importance of people like me, who did nothing special to deserve all of the opportunities they have been given, to remember that they have a social responsibility to those who were simply unlucky.

Thank you so much for supporting me, financially or not, for this experience has been influential in ways words cannot express, and has reaffirmed my mission to help eradicate the most widespread violation of human rights from the earth.

-Jahan