Resultados

We did our first round of the Ikatu survey last week, and have done a good bit of data analysis. This week we are going to administer the survey to the remaining 110 women.

Here are some of the results from the survey of the first 18 women. (My formatting is very imperfect; if there's an easier way to put things like Excel documents in a blog, feel free to fill me in! I think clicking on the images should make them bigger/more readable??)

But, in case my formatting is as bad as I'm afraid it is, a little information to help you get the idea more visually: each row is one of the 50 indicators, each column one of the interviewed women. Each green square means a woman who is at a level three of that particular indicator (out of poverty), a yellow square means a level two, and a red square a level three (extreme poverty). There's a surprising amount of green, no? This is a good thing.

However, a couple of notes. First, the committees that are being given this first round of surveys were chosen for the pilot program because they are the most successful committees. So, there are many committees that are worse off than they. Also, when we say a woman is at a level three, this means she is out of poverty. This does not mean she is not poor anymore, as you and I would define it. To give a more specific example, I have added a picture of Noemi's (one of the first women we interviewed) main room:

On the right of the photo with the curtains hanging over the doorways are the two bedrooms in the house. Noemi is at a level three for the "separate bedrooms" indicator. The requirements to be at a level three for this indicator are 1) no children sleeping in the same bedroom as the parents, and 2) adolescent children (12 and older) sleep in bedrooms seperate from the younger children. So Noemi and her partner (whom she has been with for 26 years but has never legally married, as is quite common) sleep in one of those bedrooms, and her three children, all under age 12, sleep in the other. The same can be said for some of the other indicators. For another example, to be at a level three for bathrooms, a home must have an enclosed (walls and a roof) bathroom that has a water cistern (basically just means the toilet can be flushed, as opposed to a hole in the ground.) And that is all. And that is all many of them have.

You might say we should redefine the levels of poverty if what you see in the above photo is considered out of poverty, but it's quite shocking actually the number of people who have so much less than Noemi. It is hard for you and I to imagine, I'm sure, but she truly is doing well. Relatively. Everything is relative. There is a certain perspective that one must adopt to avoid being perpetually heartbroken, I think. You need to convince yourself that this woman is lucky. And she is.