by Carly Landgrave, Monitoring & Evaluation Intern

The Awamaki Monitoring and Evaluation team regularly travel up to our communities to survey our cooperatives. Over the summer they headed to Huilloc to collect data with our Awamaki artisans and brought a camera to capture the trip!The volunteers, Nate and Carly, under the direction of their coordinator, Giulia, hoped to gain information about the artisans’ living conditions, their previous training, and the distance each artisan lived from the weaving center. This information is important for Awamaki in order to evaluate how well we achieve our mission in Huilloc, and if there are factors which limit an artisan’s ability to earn money through working with Awamaki.

While surveying, Giulia asked each woman questions about her house and her livestock. These responses were recorded and later entered into a database that assigned “wealth points” to each woman depending upon her collective belongings. Nate and Carly managed a GPS mapping tool, recording the coordinates of each woman’s house. These coordinates will be used to create a map of where the women live, and to evaluate whether or not their distance from the weaving center affects how much income they earn.

Nate also took pictures of artisan’s homes that had additional rooms to host tourists. These pictures will help Awamaki to set up a tourism hosting program in Huilloc, similar to the one that exists in Patacancha.

After surveying all 12 women within the Huilloc cooperative, Giulia, Nate, and Carly headed back to the office to process the data.

Surveys such as this are important for Awamaki to evaluate how well its impact is realized in each community. We can’t wait to see what the monitoring and evaluation team has in store for their future research!

If this kind of work sounds like something you or your favorite student statistician were born to do,

apply for our summer program. We’re accepting applicants now!