FINCA RESEARCH FELLOW

Scope of Work:

The Douglas College student fellow will provide eleven weeks of assistance to FINCA International during the summer of 2011 to FINCA’s Affiliates and/or Partner microfinance institutions (MFI) in Zambia. The Fellow will spend the first few days in the assigned country briefing local staff about the research and creating the client visitation schedule. The Fellow will also spend time in the first week of the assignment training any local surveyors provided by the affiliate. The following eight and a half weeks will be dedicated to conducting quantitative interviews with FINCA’s Client Assessment Tool (FCAT) and in some cases the Standard of Living Tool and cleaning the dataset. The tenth week will be spent in the assigned country during which time the team will prepare a report based on their research and analysis in English (and the local language as requested), as well as a PowerPoint presentation.

The FCAT is an established and tested methodology that measures the poverty levels of clients from both monetary (consumptions and income) and social perspectives (basic standard of living metrics and human capabilities.) The Fellow will be responsible for interviewing and supervising local surveyors an assigned quota of respondents, covering a random sample of clients. In some cases, the clients surveyed must be the same clients surveyed in prior years so that comparisons may be drawn and changes in their living standards and monetary perspectives.

Website:

http://www.finca.org

Internship Title:

Research Fellow

Internship Summary

Major Activities:

  • At the start of each field assignment brief senior management of the Affiliate in the methodology to be employed, target sample size and team member backgrounds and interest in microfinance.
  • Work with host-country program staff to establish a field visitation schedule and finalize the interview sampling plan.
  • Conduct a target of 5 interviews a day using the FCAT questionnaire or ten SLT, when using a personal digital assistant (PDA).
  • At the end of each interview day the Fellow will synchronize the PDA with the team’s laptop, and clean the data looking for outliers, errors, erroneous data etc.
  • Once a week, the team will e-mail a copy of their database to the Project Supervisor so that quality and sampling controls can be applied.
  • Once a week, the team will e-mail a brief (1 pg.) update with relevant findings and insights to the Project Supervisor with copies to the affiliate point of contact
  • Conduct an analysis of the data using the provided template and prepare a narrative report of findings in English and a local language.
  • Present the findings (as a power point presentation) to host-country management prior to departure, with an English copy submitted to the Project Supervisor at FINCA International Headquarters in Washington, DC.
  • Fill out a survey following the research to provide feedback about the survey process and suggestions for future research.

Personal Specifications

Knowledge and Education

  • Highly qualified undergraduate students
  • English fluency

Exposure

  • Field experience: internships and/or volunteering with community-based organizations
  • Study/work experience in the microfinance, finance and/or development fields beneficial

Job Skills

  • Background or coursework in quantitative analysis, statistics and statistical software (especially STATA and advanced Excel) highly desirable
  • Excellent writing, communication, and presentation skills
  • Flexibility to work in varied environments
  • Teamwork skills and respect for cultural differences

Other

  • Commitment to international development and FINCA’s mission.