Tales from the Hood lays out the harsh reality of aid work - lots of manual data entry. How does that stack up against Robert K’s Talking Papers?
About two thirds of the form was numerical, and so entering that data got to be pretty mechanical after the first hour or two. But that last third was all qualitative stuff: open-ended interview questions where at times the respondents appeared to have rambled or gone on wild tangents.
The first two thirds could be covered more easily by automation (although you’d still need somebody to feed the machine and to check the OCR) but that last third – the qualitative stuff is never going to fit into the machine comfortably.
But let’s forget the information management and keep in mind the “description of chronic, always-in-the-back-of-your-mind hunger by someone who’d lost everything” that the Hoodie passes on to us from a scrap of paper in Port-au-Prince:
The hunger is… a hole beneath our hearts.
Now that I think about it, that’s the reality of aid work – that and these lessons from Catherine at AIDG. Sometimes it helps to have non-aid workers tell the rest of the world what it’s really like…
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Paul, your post is bringing a smile to my face as I sit in front of a team that is entering 400+ hand scrawled forms into excel spreadsheets that date from November… and this isn’t a rapid onset emergency, we’re talking about an “emergency” operation that’s six years old!
The reality of the next 5-10 years is that small portable computer devices will get smaller and cheaper and eventually we’ll hand them out to field staff to fill in forms like we hand out cell phones or GPS receivers. Till then, we have binders…
We hand out cell phones? I always take my own…
True, I always take my own cell phones on mission, but upon landing in X country with Y organisation, I invariably get handed some 15 dollar Chinese handset that is held together by scotch tape and has my name labeled on it. I politely keep the sim card and give back the phone. Now if I was handed a smart phone that could record survey data, I might react differently.
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