BRAC Uganda - Week 4

My month here at BRAC and in Kampala has been wonderful and productive. I’m happy that I have some weeks to spend here and wish I had even more time. My coworkers have been a source of support in navigating to new areas by public transit in Kampala and helping me troubleshoot things like registering my local SIM card. Every work day we have a in-house cooking team make us lunch. The lunch is less like cafeteria food and more like homecooked local food, which I look forward to every day. The typical Uganda food includes maatoke (a plantain-based mashed potato-like staple), posho (a millet-based staple that is closest to Tanzania/Kenya’s ugali), beans in a savory sauce, chicken, beef, goat, fish (Nile Perch is the common variety from Lake Victoria), avocado, collard greens, cabbage, and sweet pumpkin. I find all of these ingredients at local street vendor stands. Food is quite affordable, especially produce, in Kampala – which I know that farming is a main employment and a majority of Ugandans live off of their land.

I went on a field visit to a local branch with my coworker, Patrick. These branches house microfinance activities that give poor women access to loans and credit. They mostly operate in rural areas throughout Uganda and other BRAC countries. I specifically stop by the Abaita Ababiri Branch, which is somewhere in between Kampala and Entebbe (the main airport town an hour away). Patrick has been overseeing a launch of a new research study about maternal and child health. There are about 20 enumerators working on piloting a sample design. BRAC designs its programs from census data and then breaks down larger geographic regions in sub-counties, districts, parishes, village, and household level. The economists ensure that they are sampling a representation from an area before they scale up the actual program. Today, Patrick is ensuring quality control by talking to one of the enumerators and checking on how households are selected into the study. I simply tag along to observe the branch, it’s like a smaller version of the many housing compounds at the BRAC headquarters. BRAC’s rigorous approach to their programs mimics an academic research study, which allows them to measure their effectiveness and know when to pivot or continue working programs.

My day-to-day goals at work are to dig deep into the sweet potato smallholder farmer program that I was interested in from the beginning. Patrick and others have shared the STATA code and datasets with me. The program conducted a pilot sampling design in 2013, a full baseline study of about 8,000 households in 2015, and a midline evaluation of programs in 2016. They plan to conduct the endline, final evaluation phase, of the program in late 2017 to early 2018. I’ve been excited to pour through the data, seeing how many questions they ask each household about farming practices, typical meals eaten, household food insecurity, child health status, womens’ health statuses, income sources, vitamin A knowledge, sweet potato knowledge, economic losses, loans currently held, and many other topics. I am interested in child health outcomes and nutrition since my finance and loan knowledge on outcomes is limited. I supplement my statistical programming with reading national documents and similar research studies on the related topics.

Outside of this project, I am also planning my upcoming training workshop, which is customarily held by graduate student interns during their time at BRAC. The topic is up to me and I want to provide a useful skillset. The previous interns held a beginners STATA workshop, which was a nice starting point to attend and observe how they conducted the workshop. I asked my coworkers which topics within my skillsets would be most useful for their work. They all have a range of research experience across different topic areas and types of methods. I specifically identified GIS mapping and qualitative research methodology as the two key areas where many staff desire but do not have current training. A few of my colleagues had also been asking me about graduate school abroad – admissions processes, standardized test taking, and especially about funding. Some colleagues are interested in masters while others a PhD with interests in both economics and public health. I decide to hold a two-hour workshop in my last week on three topics: GIS mapping, qualitative theory, and graduate school admissions.

Not all is work, I also immerse in outside activities. One weekend, I went to a multi-day music festival called the Nyege Nyege Festival in semi-rural Jinja, Uganda. The three-days of events featured African and international artists while drawing attendees from across the region. Last weekend, I took a long bus trip to Kigali, Rwanda for a weekend. The very inexpensive (~$22 USD) roundtrip bus ride is about 9 hours each way. I love local bus rides, where you get to see the country passing by, and take in scenes that you entirely miss on planes. In my suburban Kampala neighborhood, I go on occasional jogs, walk around the local area, and take the vans into central Kampala.