BRAC Uganda - Final Week 7

Today is my last day at BRAC. I can’t believe how quickly the time flew by and I wish I had just a few more weeks. In the last few weeks, my teammates and I have accomplished quite a bit. We used data from the sweet potato farmer program and analyzed whether certain factors are linked to child nutrition. I was specifically interested in farmers’ experiences of major climate events that led to crop loss. These climate events were survey questions asking farmers whether they had experienced major crop loss due to droughts, flooding, or pests and diseases. After running analyses in STATA software, we found that 88% of farmers experienced crop loss due to drought, 21% due to flooding, and 40% due to pests and diseases. When running a regression to see if there are any relationships between climate events and having a stunted child (short for their age) in the household, we found that drought reports were related to having a stunted child. We submitted a total of four abstracts to two conferences on different themes with the research. For my two colleagues, I believe this is their first conference submission. They are talented and I know one might have an interest in pursuing a PhD or further graduate school.

Yesterday, I held a 2-hour training workshop with 11 attendees. It was exciting to apply my skillsets from UCLA to others. I focused the workshop into 3 components: GIS mapping, qualitative theory, and international graduate school admissions. Of course, my actual experience is far more limited than my coworkers who all have years of field experience. And while academia tends to use expensive and proprietary software like ArcGIS for geographic mapping and STATA or SAS for statistical programming, I realize these are prohibitive in Uganda with their expensive licensing fees. So I sought out to learn and then teach a free GIS software called QGIS. I developed a step-by-step guide for open-access and free data and then integrated this into QGIS. We had some minor downloading and internet hiccups, to be expected, but my 13 attendees created colorful and beautiful maps of Uganda. I’m glad most shared the “wow” moment when your maps function and you have a color schematic of dots that were once longitude and latitude coordinates.

I met with my supervisor and main coworkers today. We put together a 3-month plan to publish the academic papers we began as abstracts! I’m looking forward to working remotely with this talented team and meaningful project. Sometimes I wonder if I’m living in a dream, working in Uganda and doing work that positively impacts thousands and millions of people. Right after this meeting on a Friday afternoon, I walked back to my office space and there was cake, soda, and a bulletin of kind sticky notes waiting for me! My coworkers had surprised me by all chipping in money to buy a cake. And as customary to other farewell parties, each person went around the room to say something nice. It was incredibly sweet and so bittersweet that I’ll be leaving without any concrete return plans. I know I leave this experience with more knowledge and connection to Sub-Saharan Africa than even before. I also know that these friendships remain and I foresee an amazing future for so many BRAC programs here. I feel more than privileged to have this opportunity, funding, and time to be in Kampala. Until next time!