The Database

My mom keeps asking me to tell her more about what we are doing here.

In the past, interns have gathered groups of people, taught them classes, collected business proposals from the students, qualified them for loans, formed loan pods, and issued loans.  This has been going on for about two years now.  As much of this program is run out of Utah, and interns are only here for three month periods, about nine months out of the year, it is easy to imagine that there are a lot of gaps and inconsistencies.

The collection rate is pretty low, and we have been assigned to figure out why, and do what we can to help improve it.  Over our first month here, we have visited around 70 different loan recipients, and gathered varying information from all of them.  These visits have helped us form a better idea of what things have been going on here.  We also have the database which contains the payment history of groups and individuals—the only information on the past we have.

Kennie manages the database.  He has been working very hard on getting it more organized.  He’s recently been searching out the most delinquent of loan recipients, so we can visit them and figure out what has been going on. 

Dallin has been working on amortization schedules and other documents for the groups of second time loan recipients who we will be giving loans to soon. 

Every day in the field, Amy asks questions and takes notes and I take pictures.  We’re currently working together to make our own little database of all loan recipients and things we learned from our visits to them. 

That’s pretty much what we have going on here.