Zambia 2018

Although I still enjoy the topic of our research project, recent challenges have made it difficult to produce a product that I can be proud of. For WaterAid, Priyanka and I are assessing the level of compliance of hospital staff to the Water, Sanitation, & Hygiene Recommended Minimum Standards for Infection Prevention & Control in Health Care Facilities at the University Teaching Hospital. We have already interviewed doctors, nurses, and the Environmental Health Officer of the hospital to gain a better understanding of the hygiene and sanitation conditions in the facility. We had also planned to assess the School Health and Nutrition Program in local schools but due to the inefficiency of some our colleagues in the office, we were unable to complete this part of our research project. This was very disheartening to me because throughout our time with WaterAid, we made an effort to continuously check in with our bosses to make sure that our research project was on-par with wha...

When Efe and I initially began contacting stakeholders for interviews, we used emails and phone calls in an attempt to reach them. However, we were met with very few responses. We became increasingly frustrated and wondered why organizations were not responding to us. However, we overcame this difficulty by pursuing a different strategy: WhatsApp. This method of communication proved to be much more effective, given that almost all Zambians use WhatsApp. After sending messages to stakeholders via WhatsApp, we received responses almost instantly. From there on, we were able to schedule interviews in a very timely manner. After having scheduled interviews, we found that finding the physical location of the interviews often proved to be a challenge. Many organizations either did not list an address online, or the address listed was incorrect. When we asked stakeholders for their address, they often replied with a plot number and a street name. The plot numbers were not entirely helpful...

When I was first placed at SANI, I was honestly a little disappointed. I had really wanted another organization and thought I would have been able to do great work there. I also had heard, to some extent, about the issues that previous Cornell students faced while working at SANI and was confused as to why we still partnered with them. However, I was intrigued by the topic of people with intellectual disabilities and their access to employment because it was not something I was very familiar with. I was excited to look at how the barriers that people with ID faced affected their access to health care. Furthermore, with my partner Alex being in ILR, I knew we would work well together to bring to light our research findings using different perspectives. Unfortunately, working with SANI has proved to be difficult. Our boss was very clear that she did not want us to bring in a health aspect. She did not appreciate us using our time to interview stake holders in the health fi...

Our time at ActionAid has been very challenging. Gabby and I had originally been given topics of climate change, gender, and livelihood resilience for which we based our initial research on a news article on ActionAid’s website. We went into Zambia with a distinct idea of what our research would be. However, on the first day we were presented with five different priority areas that ActionAid works within and told to pick a topic. During our pre-departure seminar, we had combined the topics of climate change, gender, and livelihood resilience together when in reality, those were three of the five priorities that ActionAid has. As a result, we spent the first week of at ActionAid reading through their Country Strategic Paper and other project frameworks trying to find our topic. The process was very time consuming because we had to read sufficiently in depth to understand where the gap in knowledge was for each priority and evaluate whether we had the capacity to contribute to this are...

It has been an interesting and challenging experience with our research so far. At first, when we were given our topic of diaspora engagement policy, Lexi and I were very skeptical and confused as neither of us had any background on the topic.   Coming from a health-oriented major and diving into a field completely unknown seemed very daunting. Further, I had never worked in a formal office setting with such responsibility before. Despite the unknowns and uncertainty, my enthusiasm for the research keeps increasing as each day passes.   As part of our research, we created a survey to identify the diaspora and their interests. A key challenge has been disseminating them and making the diaspora take the survey. We knew it would be difficult partly as there is very less data on the diaspora. However, we have tried exhausting all our resources and we are still trying to find ways for the diaspora to take the survey. We targeted to have at least 100 responses. We have 68 respo...