Welcome back to my blog! If you are tuning in, I hope you are excited to read about the next chapter in Indonesia because we are jumping right into it!
Within the first week staying at IPB in Bogor, we soon began learning about monitoring and evaluation. We learned in about an hour how to create problem trees and logical frameworks. Once this was covered, we learned about Monitoring and Evaluation in a Timely Response in detail. We also split up into groups and began observing development projects in rural villages which had been initiated by IPB. Many villages had several projects occurring at the same time so each trip we took to a village took nearly all day or several days. Personally, this experience on its own was very eye opening because I had never been directly exposed to rural poverty. It was humbling seeing how villagers lived day to day and seeing how they treated us with such generosity and kindness with the little they had.
Once we visited all the villages, it was time to decide which group and village we would work in for the remainder of the term. I decided to work in a nearby village called Situ Gede with several other group members. As a group, we decided to focus on three projects in the village, namely briquette making, taro processing, and microfinance. Within our group we each focused on one of the three projects. I predominantly focused on briquette making, which involved manually making rice husks into briquettes using the technology provided by IPB. This project was particularly interesting because of the failures our group discovered in the design and implementation of the project in the village. For instance, one of the major design flaws in implementing the project in Situ Gede was that the village did not have many rice fields, which meant that there were little rice husks available. Thus, rice husks had to be imported from other nearby villages, adding to the cost of the briquettes, which ultimately was one of the various reasons that led to the failure of the project.
Throughout the month, our group would visit and interview various people involved with the three chosen projects, speaking local villagers and IPB professors who were involved in the design or implementation of the project. We also visited nearby villages of similar environments and socioeconomic status in order to assess the effectiveness of the results of each of the projects. Moreover, other research consisted of online research from scholarly articles and papers. At the end of the month of May, each group presented their evaluation of the projects of their given village. We presented to a range of people, from IPB professors to local village leaders and everyone in between. It was extremely interesting to listen to the responses from the local IPB professors and villagers, as well as listen to the other groups discuss the projects within their villages. In general, it was fascinating reflecting on the various effects of development projects within the villages we worked in.
Stay tuned for my next post as I reflect on the course as a whole!