Siobhan McDonough, Writer
Linking from the IDinsight blog. By Siobhan McDonough […] IDinsight’s team interviewed about 20 female surveyors, supervisors, and field managers across four of our global hubs to get a sense of their experiences and challenges. In this post we’ll share challenges female surveyors, supervisors, and field managers have faced and their advice for mitigating risks. In…
The travel blog is back! After barely leaving Delhi for the first half of 2019, I’ve been able to take a lot of trips since September. Since I find blogs from other travellers, and solo female travellers specifically, invaluable, I’m hoping this might be helpful! The first solo trip I took in India was to…
Linking from the IDinsight blog. By Siobhan McDonough, Karan Nagpal, and Andrés L. Parrado In December 2019, IDinsight Financial Inclusion team members attended the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) conference on Economic Growth and Development. Manager Andrés Parrado presented a paper on the results of sending SMS reminders to banking agents in rural India. A future blog post will…
It is the middle of a pandemic. I am in the rain in a windy city, looking through all the writing I’d meant to post on this blog. *** January 16th, 2020 The best time of year in New England is September and October. Everyone who’s been there knows this. It’s the time of year…
I haven’t left India in almost a year. As always I have complicated feelings about this, but sometimes less is more when it comes to self-reflection, and as multiple people have told me: “not everything needs to fit into some clean narrative, sometimes you just have to live life and deal with the consequences” (thankfully,…
The first time I flew into Delhi in early February, I had the sense we were descending into an abyss of smog. It was like a vortex below us; clear blue sky above, grey clouds of particulate matter below. I wondered when I would see the sky again. The sky came back, blue-grey, in March….
Last Sunday, I walked around Mehrauli Archaeological Park. Families picnic and cricketers play near thousands of years of ruins, jumbled in intervals through a silent forest. It is lovely, not yet well-known to tourists like the adjacent Qutub Minar, not yet manicured. Plants creep up the rusted gates of tombs. Even on a Sunday afternoon…
Linking from the IDinsight blog. By Siobhan McDonough, Pulkit Agarwal, Ritika Rastogi, and Karan Nagpal Our team piloted the Likert scale to address social biases potentially influencing participants’ answers. Summary IDinsight aims to use the right evidence tool in each context to find effective solutions to social challenges. We wanted to understand why people were engaging in open…
Every so often my peers from college reach out to me to find out how to join the international development sector. Or new development workers reach out wanting to know what to expect. Or recent grads reach out for general work/life tips “because I am entering [tech/finance] but don’t want to lose my soul”. I…
Linking from the IDinsight blog. By Siobhan McDonough, heather lanthorn, Kondwani-yobe Mumba, and Kevin Kelsey This post explores how IDinsight addressed the tendency of program staff to want their most successful participants surveyed. Introduction It can be a huge challenge identifying survey respondents in sparsely populated regions with limited information about where people live. This is especially the…