Week 3: Official Entry No. 3

Habitat for Humanity International
Asia-Pacific Office
Bangkok, Thailand

I. Tasks Accomplished

For the first few days of this week we continued to work on the monotonous job of putting all of the data into the excel spreadsheet. It was pretty boring since we kept on repeating what we did but I kind of got used to it and didn't really mind anymore. But around the middle of the week we were done with the input of all the hard data. By the end, we had more than a thousand names scattered over 5 different forms of survey, which we will have to combine into one sheet so that we can analyze everything in one go.

So by mid-week we moved on to figuring out how to download the data from Survey Monkey, which I don't think is hard to do. But the thing is, I've never done it before and our boss has no idea how to do it. But I think we finally get it after looking at the help section of the site though we haven't gotten around to doing it yet. There are a lot of data online and we're going to need it for the analysis part.

So the last task that we have to do for this week and until we get it done, is to sort everything by country and year (and even by host/affiliate). Then we're going to compute everything so that we can see the overall rating of each affiliate or country during a certain year. From these data we can compare each country's performance during a build so that eventually we can figure out what caused a country to perform well or badly during a certain year.

Okay, I think I lost you of boredom. Sorry, sorry.

Anyway, the gist here and what we have to remember is that the main goal of this entire project is for our big bosses to know how to evaluate each country and to give recommendations.

II. Problems and Challenges encountered:

Nothing much this week. The main challenge was really to get the data entry done so that we can move on to other things. And when we did move on to the online, the problem there was trying to figure out how to download it, which is pretty okay because we got a lot of instructions from Habitat Europe and the Survey Monkey instructions were pretty clear.

So now what we just need to do is to finish the statistics part so that we can move on to the analysis.

III. Knowledge applied

I hate to keep on saying this, but EXCEL, again. And maybe a little bit of marketing especially the part in marketing where we had to get people to answer questionnaires and collate the data for analysis. I remember that we also used Survey Monkey to get more respondents to answer our survey too, so that site sure comes in handy.

IV. General comments and suggestions

I have to share this. It's not part of the project that I'm doing but it's happening in our office and it's big.

All NGOs worldwide, including here in Bangkok are trying to get into Myanmar in order to see how they can help. Habitat is one of them. The problem is that Habitat has no office there so they don't have locals who can tell them what's going on. So since Wednesday, they've been trying to obtain visas to enter the country to no avail. The embassy runs a check on them, sees that they work for NGOs and denies their visa application unless they get permission from Yangon.

They tried using high level contacts to no avail and are partnering with other NGOs who also have the same problem. UN presided over a meeting of the NGOs and asked --- and this is the UN we are talking about --- for NGOs to share info on how they could get their visas if any of them are granted. Which didn't happen anyway.

I think it's sad how this is happening. How ten times worst things must be over there. And how helpless the NGOs must feel (some of them were just shaking their heads in frustration) --- not being able to go in and help.