Internship #2 has begun

I just realized that it has been one week since I’ve started my new internship and I haven’t written about it. Shame! I am working at Imbita Swaziland Women’s Finance Trust (Imbita for short) in Manzini. “The organization’s vision and mission is to make credit accessible for the poor to uplift their economic status. It does this by giving small loans to women in the rural and peri-urban areas, promoting the culture of saving among Swazis, providing women with demand-driven, high-quality training services; and building the capacity of people participating in the small and medium size enterprise sector so that they can become large enterprises capable of creating job opportunities.”
“Imbita offers three main programs and services: savings, loans and training. Imbita requires that all women seeking to receive loans attend training sessions which are four days (32 hours) long. Imbita staff go to the villages and train the women on cash and credit management, budgeting, marketing, pricing, record-keeping and the consequences of signing a contract. They learn about the benefits of loans and the importance of making payments, including how to do that within their own villages.”

My expectations here are a little daunting; my title is ‘Monitor and Evaluation Trainer’. I have never done M&E in my life and the thought of training professionals on something I know very little about is something I am very uncomfortable with. I have spent a lot of time doing research and speaking to other development workers in the area. My plan is to job shadow for a month or so and get a sense of what is needed here. There is currently no M&E being done. I think I will be doing training on what exactly M&E is and perhaps the next intern can set a practice in place. In the mean time I am getting workshops ready on report writing and using excel. Not exactly my interest area but I am learning a lot and getting experience in other areas (yea computers).

Watch for details of my first day in the field – what an eye opener!!! Appreciate all you have my friends.