This week I made substantial progress working with the Research team. I began looking into the survey data for impact evaluation and also started a new project that the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women was working on. I attended a webinar by the IFC on digital finance inclusion, as well as conducted literature review on inclusive finance through alternative lending strategies. These outputs served as foundational research for a new four-year research project at the Foundation regarding finance inclusion in low- and middle- income countries. I was proud of learning to work with survey data and conducting extensive background research to inform project negotiations by the leadership team. I also began thinking about my independent research project on AI adoption among women entrepreneurs, and looked into data from surveys.
I initially approached the qualitative responses too much through the structure of the existing survey, which risked forcing women's experiences into categories that did not fully represent them. Once I started identifying responses that fell outside the predefined options, I realized that the unexpected answers could be important findings. In future analyses, I want to actively look for evidence that challenges the assumptions built into the survey design and be more diligent to details when designing surveys.
The most visible values this week were curious and brave. I was willing to question the existing categories rather than assuming that the survey had captured the full range of experiences.
Working directly with women's responses reminded me that qualitative data represents people's lived experiences rather than simply numbers in a dataset. I had to be careful not to generalize from individual responses while still recognizing patterns across them.
Next week, I will build a more explicit process for identifying findings that fall outside predefined categories. I will intentionally look for contradictions and missing perspectives before finalizing conclusions.