Research and innovation project
September – October 2012
“I started my mission in India; however, after almost four years I still entangled with the soul of that experience.
There were so much things going on in the last days before my departure to India. Buying ticket, vaccination, final coordination…
I have talked with some of the Italian volunteers who had previously gone to IIMC. Although each one had their own story and different challenges, they all had one common experience which can be put into these four words “a pleasant memorable challenge”.
I was part of a research team and we were studying microfinance institutions from a policy analysis and innovation perspective. I had to go to IIMC as the representative of our group to collect raw data. We had worked on some research questions and developed the design of our experiments. But due to lack of information we had from the IIMC microfinance, there were many uncertainties in our design.
Having many thoughts and anxiety, I started my journey to India on September 2012. I had planned to stay in IIMC for two months. I had a hard time in the first month of my mission mainly because of culture differences, changing in the plans, and in general all the new things and challenges I had faced. Pushing things forward accompanied by hard work, changed the situation and made my second month of stay in IIMC a completely different experience compared to my first month. I could make a significant progress in accomplishing my duties and my team back in Italy was glad and satisfied of the progress I had made. Conducting a good research was not the whole story, knowing people with different and interesting backgrounds in IIMC, and exploring the beautiful and mysterious India made my whole trip an unforgettable time in my life.
Back to Italy we worked hard on the data I had collected and this cooperation led to a valuable article which we recently published in in the prestigious journal of World Development Perspectives.”
Mehrdad
