Ikatu

Again, this is going to be more on microfinance and poverty, so if you're uniterested, consider yourself warned.

Ikatu means "we can" in Guarani and is the name of the main project I'm going to be working on while here. It is a pilot program with multiple objectives and methodologies that the Fundación is in the process of developing and implementing.

One of the first projects of Ikatu was to decide how to define and measure poverty. As I'm sure you can imagine, this is a somewhat daunting task. Ikatu came up with 50 "indicators" of poverty, ranging from the income level or the availability of potable water to the education level of the women and their children, to the ability of the women to communicate effectively and resolve problems or the ability to make a budget that includes saving some portion of their income. The indicators cover a wide range of factors, some of which are very obvious and physical, others of which are more internal. For each indicator, there are three "levels." Level one is extreme poverty, level two is general poverty, and level three is out of poverty. There are also vital behaviors that are linked to each indicator that will, in theory, allow for the progression of the women into higher levels of that indicator.

There are many programs and organizations that have as their stated goal the eradication of poverty, but few of them actually have comprehensive and specific definitions of poverty, and even less what it would actually look like for an individual to have pulled themselves out of poverty. Ikatu is somewhat revolutionary in this sense.

So this week and last, along with two other interns, I've been working on developing a survey that we can administer to women to accurately measure their level of poverty. This will be repeated some time after the implementation of Ikatu to measure its success and the women's progress. We are also attempting through this survey to discover which behaviors the most successful women and committees have that contribute to their success. It's a long survey! Once these vital behaviors have been pinned down the main goal of Ikatu will be to provide capacitaciones (trainings) and other means of influencing the women to adopt these vital behaviors, thereby augmenting the loans in their effort to pull themselves out of poverty.

Rumor has it that we're going to get to go out into the field with the asesores and observe and assist with the administration of the survey...but I'm unconvinced of this. Vamos a ver!