Ladybug's field notes

Visiting field areas for work is always an exhilarating experience as you get to learn much faster than you can learn from a report. As one keenly listens to people and their observations one tends make more connections in one's head. Many assumptions get challenged. Many new learnings emerge.  I recently visited areas around the Indo-Nepal border in Uttar Pradesh. One of the most interesting insight that I got during this travel is that there is active push-back to adolescents’ aspirations. The Community Developers or the field workers working in these areas found this active push-back as one of the greatest challenges in working with adolescents. I would have assumed it is around getting boys and girls to sit together for the sessions in the villages, which was surprisingly seen as a positive thing by the mothers with whom I talked to.  They felt it was important. However, I heard that the greatest challenge came from the village elders who think by engaging with...

I spent close to two decades in the development sector and about a decade and a half of which was spent as a donor's worker. It feels like a good time to reflect on the learning :) One of the things that has really intrigued me is the "want" for swift results as a donor. I probably came into the sector at a time when the discourse was shifting from "issues of poverty and disenfranchisement take a long time to address" to "we need to see the change in our period in the organisation that we are working for" or in other words "we are impatient optimists". I also got the dominant thought of that time as follows: "What can make me Mohammad Yunus of health or education or livelihood?" Probably a lot of business leaders were asking this.  Dr. Yunus broke new grounds by showing the banks (a profit making business) that poorer segments of the society can be their customers too and he introduced the non-profit sector to the idea that ...