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Thoughts on living in the developing world

3/23/2016

2 Comments

 
When we decided to do this project many of our advisors suggested we spend time in the developing world to get a stronger sense of some factors that we wouldn’t from reading the statistics. Only one member of our team had spent significant time in the developing world and we thought there could be considerable learning value from spending some time there.
One way we came up with to take advantage of this learning value was living in India while doing our, mostly online, charity and intervention research. This way we could slowly get a soft sense of many different factors over time through a sort of passive learning.

We learnt a lot about India in the first two weeks. We got a more visual sense of cellphone/smartphone penetration rates -- very high even in slums -- and saw the importance of mobility in walking through the Indian streets -- the streets and walkways are often rugged and only partly paved, making travel harder on anyone with a disability. But as time progressed, we hit less and less of the “passive” learning value activities, and instead we suspected that the highest value remaining learning activities would come from more deliberate and time consuming activities, such as surveying certain populations about our top charity options or running specific micro pilots. This would come at the considerable cost of reducing our online research hours. We don’t feel this is a good tradeoff at this point in our research.

We have also found some cons of living in India. Most importantly, we felt a subtle but measurable drain on our weekly productivity. While it is hard to tell the full cause of this, we felt the weight of poorer sleeping and living conditions, higher levels of air pollution/sickness, regular internet and power outages, and general logistical time costs of living in an unfamiliar country all likely contributed.  It became clear to us that spending further time learning in India would come at a significant cost to running our research program.

After spending about two months in India we did a plan re-evaluation and we decided that it wasn’t worth the costs to remain in the developing world at this time, though we’re definitely opening to returning at a later point, perhaps for a shorter time span and with a more specific plan of what we would like to accomplish. We also think it could be quite valuable to focus on a more specific area where we could hire a translator and get a sense of the more specific cultural factors we would expect to interact with when creating a charity there.

2 Comments
Josh Jacobson
3/24/2016 06:36:29 pm

I'd be interested to know more about this, and the planning of it. Why did you choose India? Why not explore multiple developing countries of all different stages? India itself, as I'm sure you're aware, is highly unique, and it (holistically) is not one of the most impoverished nations.

Other than what was a slightly sanitized, but mostly OK slum tour (I did the same one), what efforts did you make to explore or get to know those in impoverished conditions?

Reply
Joey
3/25/2016 09:57:06 am

We chose India for a few different reasons. We had an Charity Science intern that was living in New Delhi at the time, one of our team members had lived in India for 6 months previously and a few of the interventions we saw as initially promising seemed best done out of India. India is indeed unique although I think the same could be said for a lot of countries and although it is not the most impoverished from a country perspective, there are certainly provinces that are pretty high up there, and due to its size it holds quite a lot of the global disease burden. We considered exploring multiple countries but ultimately thought that would end up being a lot of time and budget costs for a small improvement in learning value.

We did a few different things including visiting a Anganwadi clinic (a mixture between a pre-school and clinic), talking to some charity workers, and interviewing some locals. We have blog posts on some of these forthcoming. Our main goal was to acquire information more passively while focusing primarily on our online research, so I would not say our explicit goal was to do a lot of activities to explore specific conditions.

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