Logistics, logistics, logistics

Hello from Nairobi!

Its hard to believe that we have already been here a month!

Our team has been working tirelessly on the logistics of the Mukuru project. For this project we are showing videos to 5,000 women in the Mukuru slum over a period of six weeks. Our treatment group will watch soap operas with strong motivational messages, and at the end we will assess the impact of the videos by statistically measuring how much more likely women who watched the videos are to participate in a sanitation campaign and join other initiatives in their community.

Emily and Whitney have done a fabulous job putting together the baseline survey. This was a long, challenging, and, at times, frustrating process of collecting questions from similar past surveys, writing questions specific to our project, debating the wording of questions and answers, and consulting various sources. After two weeks of hard work they are almost finished. Keith, another GPPI graduate student, has been working tirelessly to program the mobile phones and the digital platform that the enumerators will use to administer the surveys in the field.

Don and Reimar have been the champions of GPS and mapping. They have worked closely with our enumerators to teach them how to use the GPS units that they will use to map the households they survey in the slums. Using the information the enumerators collected, they have put together a comprehensive map of Mukuru that outlines our sampling and randomization areas.

Hannah has worked on the presentation for the enumerator training. Just over a week ago we all pitched in to interview several candidates and ultimately selected 60 individuals as our enumerators. These enumerators will be responsible for recruiting and surveying the women to participate in our research project. When she is not working on preparing these enumerators for the field, Hannah has harnessed her law skills to write a contract for our hired venues and her marketing skills to make flyers and participation cards for our recruited women.

In the next month we have so much to do! At work, we will begin to conduct our baseline survey and prepare for the video showings. Coordinating the video showings is an enormous logistical task. We have had to purchase projects and generators, and have contracted with local craftsmen to make benches and screens. In our free time, we will see the wildebeest migration on our Kenyan safari. More stories to come soon!

-Hannah