20091102 – The Ashoka incremental housing project

This blog entry is intended to give a short answer to the many questions I received on how the project is progressing and what exactly we are doing. Needless to say, we do not only go on sightseeing tours and enjoy ourselves. During weekdays we work hard in order to get our deliverables produced in the limited timeframe available (one month).

The incremental housing project is still on track. We are well aligned with our client. Our team of three IBM-ers (Annamari, Rich and me) is extended with Elizabeth, an intern at Ashoka coming from US. Daily the four of us are working at the SAATH office where a lady brings us water and chai (tea with milk and a lot of sugar). SAATH and SEWA are important partners for Ashoka. They are very helpful and effective in making the necessary arrangements for us to be able to fulfil our task. They

• show us around in slums,
• arrange meetings with slum people,
• translate during these meetings and
• provide any additional information we need.

Furthermore, SAATH and SEWA have conducted a survey in ten Ahmedabad slums providing information relevant to our project.

We have applied the IBM standard ´Issue Based Consulting´-techniques in order to define clear and specific questions leading to our goal. In order to answer these questions we are gathering information through:
- analysis on the survey data (using SPSS)
- meetings with different groups of slum dwellers (community based organisations, constructors, daily wagers)
- meetings with material suppliers
- meetings with microfinance institutions.
By now, we know quite a lot about slums, incremental housing, barriers involved, etc. and we keep learning in a fast pace.

All in all this keeps us quite busy; next week is the week that we have to deliver…