Actual Microfinance Biz

Since I’ve only blogged about the people and culture so far, I figured it was time to blog about microfinance a bit…

Although I was somewhat worried about our roles here in Atorkor as interns of a (relatively) new microfinance organization (MFO), we’ve all been keeping busy by tackling problems from many angles. I’ve recently started collecting data with Open Data Kit (ODK), which is a program supported by the Google Android platform that allows us to measure the likeliness that a person I interview is living in poverty. So far, it’s been very interesting going around the village of Atorkor and interviewing different people and interviewing them about their families and well-being. ODK also aggregates the data into a spreadsheet for us, which allows us to manipulate the data easily.

As a long-term goal, we hope to use the information derived from our data to gain better insight on the well-being of potential clients. This will allow Lumana to better allocate its resources by distributing loans to clients that appear to maximize the value of their loans by devoting resources to assets that decrease their likelihood of living in poverty.

As with all fieldwork, everything sounds much simpler on paper than in reality. Walking from house to house in the scorching heat takes lots of energy. After trekking to a client’s house, there’s a good chance they might be away at market selling their goods or at church. On top of that, our phone, which contains ODK, might not be able to connect to the internet sometimes in order to capture the location of our clients. Oh, and I almost forgot to mention the flies and mosquitoes… Regardless, the data we’re collecting will be useful in the future, and the unique experience is definitely worth having.

P.S. Upload speeds are slow, so getting pictures up aren’t such a good idea. I’ll try to get some up when I get some better internet…