Longevity Study: Meeting with the Business Mentors

August 1, 2009

Over the past week and a half, I met with four of the business mentors (BMs) who had businesses in the pilot longevity study that I had previously conducted. The BMs are a core part of VEF’s program: they live in areas that VEF works in, and they spread the word about VEF at the village level. They help people form groups, lead them through business training, and, if the group qualifies for the grant, provide advice and mentoring to the business as it is getting started.

As I described in earlier posts, I trained independent evaluators to collect the data firsthand on the 65 businesses included in the study. We managed to reach 59 in the week we spent out in the field. I wanted to speak with the BMs, however, to see if their knowledge of the businesses could shed any new light on the data that we had collected.

As you might imagine, it was a tough task for the BMs to remember how a random sampling of their businesses started between 2 to 4 years ago were doing. There were some cases where the BM had not visited the business in some time. This happened for a variety of reasons: in Father William’s case, for example, he had been transferred to a different parish and didn’t have many chances to go back to his old parish. The most common answer was that the BM simply did not have time to visit all of them. The BMs help start as many as 40 businesses each year, and so they have plenty of work to do in just keeping an eye on the businesses that are in their first year. This does not mean that they neglect the others. For one thing, the businesses that the BM helps to start are usually run by a group of people that the BM knows because, as I’ve quickly learned, in these villages everyone seems to know everyone. So the BM doesn’t have to make a point of going to inquire specifically about each business; he or she will most likely just see the beneficiaries on the road or in the market or at church. Also, because word travels so fast around here, the BM probably would be able to get a sense of how the business is doing without even visiting it!

So even though there were some cases where the BM said that he or she didn’t know how the business was doing, most of the time the BM was able to provide at least some insight into the current state of the business. More often than not, the BM’s answer matched what we found in the field. There were a few cases, however, where I learned new information about the business from the BM. For example, in cases where the business was no longer in operation the BMs were usually able to provide their opinion about why it failed (which sometimes differed from the explanation we heard in the field). Also, there were a few cases where the BM’s insight led us to follow up again with the business and ask more pointed questions that helped us to establish clearly whether or not the business was operating.

In the big picture, getting the BMs’ input into how the business was doing solidified my confidence in the data even more, and helped me to identify places where a follow-up interview with the business group was necessary. Gathering reliable data is very challenging out here. There are many variables (especially with groups of 5), and it is hard to reach some of the people and businesses you are trying to visit. I think that the survey data we gathered, however, is as strong as we can realistically hope for. In the end, we drew on the institutional knowledge in the villages (for help finding the beneficiaries), the firsthand description of how the business was doing given by the group members, and then finally the BM’s third person perspective on the business. I am optimistic that we can scale up this methodology to cover all the regions where VEF works in Kenya.