Wrapping up in western Kenya

August 23, 2009

Last Sunday marked the end of my time in Western Kenya. It was with great sadness that I bid farewell to the many friends I made over the course of the summer (including Bryan, pictured above, who was the evaluator I worked with on the profit-sharing study), and with particular sadness that I left Rowland, Judy, and the rest of the family whom I had spent 2+ months with. In my next post, I’ll write about some of the big-picture things that I learned from my experience this summer. Here, I’ll sum up the last week of the profit sharing study.

As I wrote last week, I had a great day in Bukura visiting Father Williams’ businesses and interviewing them for the profit-sharing study. That day in Bukura was the 3rd day of the study. As I became more familiar with the types of responses I was receiving to the questions, I was better able to ask them in a way that would yield accurate answers (in that I was no longer interviewing people who claimed that each business member was making 10 KSH per day ($0.13) and living on that money alone). I also talked with Rowland who helped give me an idea of what a normal vegetable selling business or a normal farming business should earn.

I had planned to do follow-up work in the study (i.e. making sure to interview at least two people from each business group separately), and that plan was made even more urgent by my realization that the data from the first two days of the study was definitely incomplete or inaccurate.

The second time around, the interviews took much longer because I decided that the best way to get a real picture of how the business was doing was to go back to the beginning. After discussing how the members used the grant, the tasks that each member was responsible for, how the business operates, and what constitutes normal revenue and expenses for a week of business (or, in some cases, I would ask them to describe their last week of work), I would finally get to the topic of how the business members share profits. Furthermore, I would request to see their record books to get a more accurate idea of the normal expenses and revenue. This roundabout approach to figure out the ways in which the members shared profits enabled me to get much more accurate data because I was able to ask particularly incisive questions if things didn’t seem to make sense. When all the numbers from the first series of questions matched up, getting an accurate answer for the important question of how profits were shared was a cinch.