8/7: Exhausted, but Exhilarated

Since we last wrote a proper project update, we have made amazing progress. We have had a number of exciting developments, after each of which we say, exhilarated, “let’s write an update about this!” Unfortunately, the nature of these developments is that they have taken up so much of our time and energy that we haven’t had much time for anything else, including writing updates. A few days ago we both caught this horrible viral flu that has been going around Dhaka and we’ve been home sick ever since then, giving us time to write an update and to realize that even with all the work we’ve got, we really need to start giving ourselves some weekends.

Local NGO Women for Women will Teach our Business Classes!

First of all, since about a week after arriving, we had been hugely stressed out trying to figure out how to get a curriculum together for the women’s business class. Upon our arrival in Bangladesh, we found out that the existing business class at Nari Jibon which we intended to enroll the participants in our program in was impractical for their needs. Unfortunately, it was clear to us from the beginning that we are wholly unequipped to teach a business class to women entrepreneurs of the slums of Dhaka, but there wasn’t anyone else around who was either. While we were searching for some direction in this mess, we came across a curriculum developed by Women for Women, a local NGO which, founded in 1973, is one of the mainstays of the Dhaka feminist community. You can read more about them here. A few years ago, with funding from JICA, the Japanese equivalent of USAID (the American international aid organization), they put together a business class which was exactly what we were looking for. It was geared toward women with an entrepreneurial spirit, exactly the kind of group we’re dealing with. In the summary of their project, they said that the primary obstacle for the women they were working with was that they didn’t have any sources of capital to start their new businesses, and it was clear that not only did we need a project like theirs, but they also needed a project like ours!

So, we decided to call up Mahmuda Islam, Executive Director of Women for Women (and a very famous Dhaka feminist scholar and activist). She graciously agreed to meet with us about getting in touch with the class’ original teachers and perhaps getting a hold of the content of their classes. During our meeting, she went even farther by offering to have the original teachers of the Women for Women business class teach our students the same class themselves. So, despite some stress in the beginning, things worked out better than we ever could have hoped for! It doesn’t get much better than this. See pictures of the business class here.

We had originally planned to have the classes stretch over about a month and a half, but the women in the group asked us to expedite the process. Because of their goal to get the business up and running before Ramadan, we decided to hold the class over a period of 2 weeks. The Women for Women trainers agreed to this and now the classes are in full swing. We are particularly looking forward to having the help of Women for Women in evaluating the progress of our group and their business plan. The project is really lucky to have this partnership, and we think that we will be a great deal more successful because of it.

Another Visit to East Rampura

We are starting to make semi-regular visits to East Rampura, to visit the women we’re working with. This time they wanted to show us their homes, which was a really incredibly experience. Slums in Dhaka are all pretty much the same: there might be one larger house or apartment, and then a number of “houses” surrounding that, which consist of one small room which houses an entire family. The nicer ones have cement walls and floors and cost around $50/month for rent. The others are more like what you might expect in a rural area (we have been surprised to find houses like these in the middle of the city), with dirt floors and walls made of corrugated tin and scrap wood and metal – these cost more like $15/month. Consistently, their hospitality is overwhelming and incredibly generous, so we had to insist this time that they didn’t buy us any food or drinks (people usually buy us Pepsi when we visit their houses) because otherwise our visits would turn into a major expense for them, which we don’t want. You can see some pictures of their houses here, here, here, and here.

Launching the Research Project

Also since our last update, we have laid the groundwork for a serious academic research assessment of our project. This will involve a series of in-depth interviews with the women in the group to determine the effects the project will have on their lives. To do this, we have hired a field worker, Bina, who has a lot of experience with this kind of research, and who worked with Kathy Ward on her earlier research on women in Dhaka. We already are very impressed with her work, and we trust her a great deal. Bina can ask the women questions that we can’t necessarily ask them, like about their incomes and their relationships with their husbands. We’re lucky to have her working with us, as she can catch a lot of things that we might miss, due to our relative unfamiliarity with Bangladeshi culture, customs, and language. Bina takes notes on all of our field visits, as well as conducts on her own all of the in-depth interviews with the women. She just started doing the baseline interviews a few days ago, and we’re getting excited to see the results. Over the course of the next few months, she will continue to interview the women, asking similar questions, and we will see how their responses change. We have been lucky, in developing our questionnaires, to have access to a whole range of questionnaires which have been used in past studies evaluating microcredit projects, as well as other studies examining women’s empowerment and gender relations in Bangladesh. What would we do without the internet!?! Right here from our laptop, we have access to databases so extensive that it’s almost like sitting in our college libraries. These research tools will be the primary instruments in measuring the successes of our project. (See some pictures of Bina getting down to business in East Rampura here and here).