Blogging Microfinance:Wagner 2007

Summer Photos

If you are interested in seeing pictures from my summer you can find them at:
http://picasaweb.google.com/jrkiessel
The pictures of forests, tea plantations and beaches are from Kerela. (There are also a few bonus shots from this fall) Enjoy!

Ups and Downs

The past week went by in a blur.

The initial submission deadline for the weather insurance paper was due on Wednesday (Thursday India time). So for the first part of the week, I juggled final data issues with output for tables that Jeremy sent me. Although I have had to strain a bit, it has been nice to put the statistics I  learned at Wagner to use. A month of daily Stata work and days spent figuring out output, reinforced my course work and has increased my confidence in the subject matter. Having said this, sitting in a hot, dim room in front of the computer for hours and days at end has not been wonderful for my spirit. It is also not what I had expected to be doing this summer. The days that I have been able to get out of the office have been my best days. For this reason, I was pretty disappointed (on many levels) when I woke up last Thursday realizing that I would be residing in the bathroom regretting last nights dinner instead of joining Monika in the field-- a well deserved trip after a week of computer work. Having no kitchen and eating out every meal in the last 2 months has made it difficult for me to guarantee that I am eating well prepared food. You just never know. I ate three times at the same restaurant before it made me sick. Anyhow, instead of visiting villages I stayed in bed. And on Friday and Saturday, I struggled to refocus my weakened mind to the lingering task of data work.

Sunday provided a refreshing new start. I woke up early and went on the "Heritage Walk of Ahmedabad." A tour that while a bit touristy was well worth waking up for. After a brief slide-show, about 15 of us walked through the narrow labyrinth-like streets of old town Ahmedabad stopping to look at 'pols' (inner city neighborhoods with gates), temples, bird houses, architecture and mosques. The tour began at Swaminarayan Mandir and ended at Jumma Masjid. Jumma Masjid is 600 years old and after walking around for a few hours in the cramped quarters of the walled city, I was not prepared for the spaciousness of the mosque.  I was also impressed by the precision of its architecture. While my camera could not seem to capture the maze-like streets, it surprisingly captured the mosque's precise construction. If you click on the second picture of the mosque, you will see that it looks as though the picture has been cut in half. The height of each pillar is so exact that they seem to cut through the photograph. As our guide said: "and they didn't even have computers 600 years ago!"

This week has been spent preparing for the end. I have been trying to wrap up my work so that I can leave for Kolkata and Darjeeling next Monday. Gunjan and I went to the VIMO SEWA office on Monday to sort out more mismatched information and today I met with Monika in the hopes of breifing her on Stata a bit so that she can use what I have done. Tomorrow she will leave with Divya to have some meetings in Chennai. It will be hard to say good bye since I have really enjoyed working with both of them.

The Return of the Monsoon

After weeks of no rain and concerns that Gujarat was moving into drought, the monsoon is back. Saturday the humidity broke and within a hour it had rained so much that there were literally children swimming in the street. Ahmedabad is without a proper drainage system and its sandy soil means that when it rains the roads become rivers. This muddy mess is worth it though because the rain provides a break from the heat -now I only sweat during the day, not at night too.

The flu has been flying around the office. It seems everyone, except Monika, has had it and some people have had it more than once. Last week, I woke up one morning with a horrible cold and my eye swollen shut. If I thought that I got starred at normally as a western woman, a fat eye drew crowds. Unsure what was happening to my body, I was convinced that I was dying. Apparently, however, this was not the case because now I am back to normal.

The paper deadline for the marketing research, is looming and the pressure is on. I spent all last week trying to figure out this duplicate household mess. It has been difficult for Monika and I to get information from aagewans, SEWA field officers, who know about the villages at a household level. There are many of them and all of them are very busy. Also since the research was done in three districts, they are spread throughout the state. Last week, I made trips to three offices (Patan, Anand and Ahmedabad) in the hopes of sitting down with staff members to discuss coupon distribution. More often than not this resulted in me coming home empty handed with promises of information in a few days. These trips, however, were enlightening in other respects. Also, new snags have been unearthed. For example, it seems that in some instances coupons were used twice, making it difficult to know which member received the marketing treatment.   

Because households have received multiple treatments and because it has been difficult to find out the scale of this problem, the researchers are initially looking at individual and village affects. Since an initial draft of their paper is due on Wednesday (tomorrow!!), it seems as though this will have to be satisfactory for now.

Above are pictures of MY hands! A woman from the SEWA office heard that I was interested in henna and took me home with her on Saturday. I spent the evening with her and she applied henna to my hands. It was nice to meet her family and I spent time playing "what is this?" with her 5 year old who is learning English.  This led to a funny situation when I pointed to a goat in a picture and asked, what is this? She replied, "a god". No, I said. A goat. She shook her head. NO! A GOD. A G-O-A-T. There was no convincing her. My accent was incorrect. The goat was a god and that was that. 

I close with a picture of some children I met begging on the street. I distracted them and got them to pose like models instead. Here is one of the resulting pictures.

Ahmedabad and Me

A week has passed since I arrived in Ahmedabad. While at first I felt a bit fatigued at the thought of restarting again, it really only took a few days to sort out my basic needs and to familiarize myself with the design of the marketing strategies used for the SEWA's weather insurance product. This is a lucky because the principal researchers (Shawn Cole, Harvard, Petia Tapolova, IMF and Jeremy Tobacman, Oxford) plan to present the initial results the first week of August. To help prepare ,the last week at work has been spent pounding out programs on Stata in order to merge, clean, code and test the data collected from weather insurance coupons and receipts. 

The primary survey that is being conducted tests the impact of SEWA's weather insurance product. Weather insurance is new to both the poor clients SEWA serves and to SEWA itself. Last year was the first year that it was offered. Unfortunately, due partially to the payout scheme and partially to moderate weather, clients did not receive payouts. Since clients were already weary about purchasing insurance and some of them had lost crops to weather, this lowered their confidence in the insurance program. (Interestingly, CMF has done a small study on client's understanding of the insurance scheme and basic math that comprehension was low even after information sessions. Demonstrating it seems that SEWA needs to find new ways to connect with their members). 

In order to increase take-up of the weather insurance product, SEWA and CMF added villages to the treatment sample and implemented a marketing scheme. The marketing project included flyers, videos and coupons (the videos were shown on hand held players). Different videos and flyers were created to test how members respond to changes in factors like: tone of language and religious affiliation. Also, coupon amounts were varied to test the elasticity of the market.

So now the marketing campaign has been completed and insurance has been purchased. CMF and SEWA now would like to know what worked and what didn't work. This is where I come in. In theory this should be straight forward but being that this is the real world things dint always work out as planned. The greatest concern is that it seems that some members might live in the same household. Therefore, one household might have received more than one treatment. All of this is unclear though so on Saturday, I am going with Monica, a research associate, while she does detective work on this matter. It should be interesting and more than anything I will be very glad to get out of the office.

Having said that it has not all been work. I have met some interesting people in the week that I have been here and have been eating out and visiting temples with them. Gujarat is a dry state (no alcohol) and conservative  but it is also safe, clean, and has great food and historical sites. It also has a lot of vegetarian restaurants partially because its large Jain population. The picture at the top of this blog is a Jain temple called Swaminarayan. The next, is a picture taken at Gandhi's Sabarmati Ashram. While I was there I found a group of reporters surrounding a small building coming out of the temple. I was pushed in to the crowd, being the token foreigner, and suddenly found myself nearly touching Pratibha Patil the woman who is expected by many to be the next president of India! Imagine. I stood there next to her as she paused and had pictures taken, having at the time no idea what I literally had stumbled upon. Finally to satisfy those who want to be sure I am alive and well, I leave you with a photo taken while I was passing time alone in a train station.

Finally, news from Ghana

It's been a long time since we arrived in Ghana, and all of our good intentions about posting regularly have dissolved! While accessing the internet is fairly inconvenient, I think the real reason for my lack of posts is that I keep feeling that I’m about to get really into the work I’m doing, but for one reason or another continue to face delays and interruptions.

A couple of weeks ago, following the NYU policy evaluation course, I returned to work on the interest rate sensitivity study that IPA (the same organization that Anna is working for this summer) is conducting in and around Accra. IPA is working with an international savings and loans organization, Opportunity International, to do a special loan promotion which has been designed as a randomized trial of various interest rates and marketing techniques. Needless to say, all our international economic development classes are coming in handy. The rationale is to discover what rates appeal to which types of business owner, thereby helping us to better understand the choices and constraints of small to medium sized businesses.

It was really helpful to take the policy evaluation course after having a couple of weeks of hands-on survey management, and I definitely felt like I could connect some of the best practices and theory that we had heard about in the class to the realities on the ground here in Accra. My role, which I share with another graduate student intern (from Duke), is to conduct monitoring and auditing of the survey / promotion as it continues. This involves going into the field and conducting some of the same interviews that the individual loan officers (ILOs) completed, as well as checking their data entry and map-making. It’s become very clear to us that this auditing is very much necessary, as we have already uncovered a range of mild to serious problems. In some ways, the process of discovering this has been very complementary to the class content; we’re learning all the ways in which a very well designed survey can run into problems in implementation.

This week we are back on track, after spending last week training the ILOs, both new and experienced, on how to conduct the study in the field and the branch. The challenge now is to set up some systems for ongoing monitoring and evaluation as the study continues for the next 6 months or so. Fortunately we have a large pool of excel-hungry public administration students here to help us do it!

One of the most unexpected “learning outcomes” for me so far has been around the role that I see for myself in evaluations like these. While I am fascinated by the theory and by the survey design, it’s become clear to me that I’m most effective in managing the organizational support and relationships necessary for these studies to be successfully conducted. In other words, I’ve come back to the practice of public administration itself via evaluation. Now, I’m wondering how many studies have failed because of organizational or logistical issues, or simply because economists sometimes have difficulty conveying the real-world importance of these types of evaluations. “Survey management” means, or should mean, a lot more than just survey design and hiring the right people. Seeing this first hand, I’m even more encouraged by the efforts of Banerjee and others to argue that evaluations should be considered as stand-alone projects, rather than as an afterthought to the “real work” of an organization.

Choquequirao

Perched on a steep mountainside in the Andes, Choquequirao is one of the “lost cities” of the Incas, and supposedly one of the last built as they were fleeing the Spanish conquistadors. Reachable only by walking a minimum of 32 km each way, going from 2800 to 1400 and back up to 3100 meters above sea level, much of the ruins of this lost city are yet to be uncovered. When the whole thing is excavated, they say it could be bigger than Machu Picchu. We started out—me, Sarah, Jane, their dog Ande, Deklan and our guide Ruben—on a four hour nighttime bus ride winding up and over the Andes mountains, which was enough to make Ande carsick. A taxi met us at a junction (I have no idea where) to take us to the town of Cachora where we would start our trek, but not before getting a flat tire. We were off to an adventurous start! In Cachora we stayed the night in a hostel and awoke at 6am to start our long day of walking. Our group now also included a porter, Ruben Dario, two mules, and a horse for riding who we named Sancho Panza. As we began the trek the road was mainly flat, but this soon gave way to intense (mostly) downhill switchbacks. We stopped at a hacienda whose inside was burned and the owner killed by Sendero Luminosos (Shining Path Guerrillas), though his 97 year old wife was still there to greet us. We saw remnants of plants that were killed by pesticide sprays meant to kill coca plants but which only killed numerous other plant species, and which were paid for by US tax dollars.

The campground where we stopped for lunch is where most groups camp the first night; little did we know we were on an expedited version of the trek, doing the trek that most do in 4-5 days in just 2.5. In the river valley we crossed the river on a precarious bridge and then started back up the mountains, where we finally reached our campground, to find it swarming with a group of students from Lima learning to be tour guides. Seeing the small niche businesses people had created along the way made me think more about the potential of microfinance services in rural areas. People actually seemed to be doing quite well in offering services, mainly beverages and camping, to tourists. However this was a special place, still carefully heeding the line between local development and over-tourism and environmental exploitation.

The next day we awoke again around 6am, and began the steep ascent to the lost city we had come to find. That last struggle of uphill switchbacks in the sun made reaching Choquequirao feel like the real icing on an 11,000 foot cake. We came out of a dark wooded path onto rows of stone terracing that led us into the central plaza. Though it was midday, there were perhaps twenty other people in the entire city the whole time we were there. We hiked up to the circular grass area which was used to dry corn and other harvested items, and with a 360 view surrounded by snowcapped mountain peaks, green forest and deep valleys, it felt as though we were on top of the world. We explored the various, mysterious sections of this ancient city, which is said to have been a military complex built as the Incas were fleeing the Spanish. But when it comes to the lost Incan cities, much is still hypothesis and theory.

As I huffed and puffed my way back, glad for any opportunity to let Sancho carry me, I was humbled watching Ruben Dario leading us all 40 miles of the way in his flimsy sandals made of tires. That night we had to make it back to where we had stopped for lunch the day before, which meant some hiking by the light of the full moon. While it was a bit scary trekking down and up steep cliffs and crossing a bridge that moves with every step in the dark, it was nice to have a break from the sweltering heat. We arrived back in Cachora the afternoon of the following day, never happier to eat a plate of spaghetti and some mystery soup. But not before passing the heartbreaking sight of children playing in sewer water using condoms as water balloons. Once back in Cusco with my scorched, dirty and insect-ravaged skin, I was truly glad to have undertaken such an adventure before they build a funicular to cart tourists en masse up the mountain to see what may then become the next Machu Picchu tourist extravaganza. That said…. congratulations to the Cusquenos, Machu Picchu is one of the 7 new wonders of the world! 

New York Times Article about Choquequirao

More of my pictures from Choquequirao

Starting off again in Gujarat

Yesterday evening I boarded a train to Kolkata so that I could fly to Gujarat today. I arrived at the CMF office in Ahmedabad this afternoon tired but ready to find out what my new assignment would be about. Details though will seemingly have to be obtained tomorrow. Until then I got settled in. I am to sleep in the spare bedroom that is part of the office (which is located in a residential building). The entire flat has not been used as a living space for some time so there is not fridge, or stove, or hot pot, or plates... well you get the idea. I have been living in a hotel for so long that currently this doesnt seem to be that big of a deal, although a fridge might have been nice.

It is sort of strange to have left the remittance project after having spent so much time thinking about it. I hope that this move ends up feeling worthwhile. Either way, Ahmedabad seems to be a nice city and I am looking forward to exploring it.

The three pictures are from Orissa. The first is of a temple I visited in Bubaneswar. The second is of Devo (an Adikar staff member) and I. The third is Jyoti (left) and Mr. Amin.

A Sudden Change of Plans

Since coming to Orissa, Jyoti and I have spent nearly all of our time discussing the survey, its design, Adhikar's needs, and constraints. It has been an arduous process but we have slowly been sorting things out. Admittedly, though at times it has felts like things are getting more muddled rather than clearer. Randomized evaluations are never easy to arrange but there are added logistical problems that come with surveying and delivering a product to migrants and their families. While we plan to survey families at the source (Orissa), the remittance product is delivered at the destination (typically Gujarat). Meanwhile, Adhikar is working under financial and regulatory constraints. The project is barely scraping by and the India's regulations on MFIs taking deposits (remittances are a type of savings) makes Adhikar's program even more vulnerable.

In addition to brainstorming with Adhikar on how they might be able to be financially independent, we are counting on the fact that they will scale-up after we finish our baseline survey so that we can roll out the product as scheduled. In order to make that possible, Jyoti and I quickly realized we would need to work in the district of Nayagarh instead of Ganjam. This has meant that we need to create a new list of villages to sample from and resort out logistics. It was also the reason that we had decided to stay in Bubaneswar.

In order to learn more about Nayagarh, this past weekend I designed two questionnaires. The first, for focus group discussions, focused on historical trends of remittances in village (at Adhikar's request) and the other, an individual survey, sought to determine what the competitive rates for service charges are in the area. This morning we met with Adhikar to begin planning the field visits and by the time we left the office late in the afternoon, it seemed that we would leave tomorrow....

That is until we spoke to Rema and Aparna and they asked me if I would be willing to go to Gujarat to work on a weather insurance project that desperately needs help. I found myself quickly agreeing... before I even knew what I was signing up for. I think that the idea of feeling really useful and completing something was so appealing that I couldn't pass it up. I then spoke to one of the Professors working on the project, Shawn Cole, about some of the details. So there it is. After finishing some work on the remittance project, I am leaving tomorrow (or the next day) for Ahmadabad.   More about that soon.

In Orissa at Last

On Sunday night, Jyoti and I boarded a train for a 22 hour trip north east to Orissa. We arrived in Bubaneswar, Orissa's capital, on Monday evening in relatively good spirits. My first impressions of Bubaneswar is that it is much cleaner and greener than Chennai. (To be fair its populations is small and really not comparable.) It is over run with cows and has many temples. I am finding that I like the Oriyan style of temples. Where as in Tamil Nadu temples are painted in bright colors, in Orissa they have more detailed, unpainted stonework. I am really looking forward to having a chance to visit more this weekend.

Jyoti and I met with Adhikar on Tuesday and Wednesday. There have been some significant shifts in our survey design. It looks like we will survey households in the district of Nayagarh not in Ganjam. This means that we will not be living in Brahmapur as planned. Because of this my role has shifted from doing costing exercises to doing focus groups in villages as we do the listing of households to be surveyed. I still will be access the costs of competitors but I think that I will learn a lot from this qualitative look at Oriyan migrant families. Now we just need to work out all of the details and I need to begin feeling a little better. My stomach has been in varying state of  unrest since Sunday and I am hoping that having it feel better will give me a boost of energy. Much need since Orissa is in the monsoon seasons and is a combination of hot, gray, and humid.
I will try to write in more detail about the project soon and will include some pictures from the last week.

Temples, Ashrams, Pondicherry and Harsha: a weekend of driving and worship

Despite a meeting last week that estimated that we would depart to Orissa today, I am still in Chennai. I began to realize last week that the chances of going out to the field today were slim, so when my sister Amanda told me that Harsha (the Chairman of Sewalanka Foundation, the development organization she works for. Check it out at: www.sewalanka.org) was coming this weekend I jumped at the chance to go to Pondicherry with him. He was coming especially to do a puja for Amanda and Sri Lanka at large, both of which have had poor luck of late. It took many hours on Saturday to reach the temple in Thirunallur (3 hours past Pondicherry), where people go to worship Saturn. Saturn is a cantankerous old god and from what I have gathered you worship him when you want to ward off evilness (Amanda are you feeling better?). Once there Harsha bathed and we all went to the temple. I am slowly learning more about Hinduism and I felt lucky to have been there with 2 spiritual men who could answer my questions.

The pictures are of women near the bathing pool, Harsha bathing before going to the temple, lights in the temple, and Dr. Balakrishnan next to shops beside the bathing pool.

Sunday involved more driving, a temple and an ashram. It was a long 36 hours with 14 hours of driving but it was nice to chat with Harsha and to meet Dr. Balakrishnan (who is a friend of Harsha’s and traveled with us). On Monday, they picked me up for lunch and after wards we drank mango juice at the infamous Fountain Plaza fruit stand below my office.

My work plans for this coming week are still sketchy. I am not sure when we will leave and I am wishing I could begin the many things we have discussed. Aparna, Jyoti and I had hoped to speak to Rema (who is currently in Ghana) but it did not happen. Now I am hoping that we will talk tomorrow. I am antsy to go to Orissa and am doing my best to temper my western expectations regarding schedules and time.