EA Learning

When we plan focus group discussions, we always need to take into account that if your environment is not child-friendly, our sample will be biased. Women with young children or meetings after school or at lunch won't work for them, for example, and thus, we will get t...

I am reposting this piece because I have seen so many efforts over the past two months to adapt and redesign our work in the face of COVID-19. All seems very well intentioned. However, I would like to emphasize that we ought to keep the client in mind as we come up wit...

In the fall of 2018, we collaborated with the IDB Lab on a cross-sectional survey of the remittance habits of 2,145 migrants from Colombia, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, and Mexico in three US cities (Los Angeles, Miami and New York).  The study "Remittances fro...

 A few years ago, EA Consultants was surveying patients in healthcare facilities in a small village in Tanzania. We offered each respondent a generous $10 for participating in our forty-minute questionnaire. Many of the village residents saw our visiting international...

If you think you are not being understood. You might not be understanding.

I recently sat with two indigenous women from a rural area in Peru as they patiently waited on line from a loan from a local cooperative. After a few rounds of questions and answers about their r...

Many institutions we work with want to segment their customers, but very few end up doing it. Yet segmentation can save costs, improve client services and help design and target product offers. It can also help reduce risk  Why is segmentation so hard when you're at th...

Many ideas get tossed out, not because they are bad ideas, but because they're not scalable. Of course, donors investors want the most bang bang for their buck that they can get. But is there an inherent contradiction between providing scalable solutions and engaging c...

In today's design-centered world, we might be tempted to design marketing materials and messages for low-income households that fit our own linguistic and aesthetic preferences.  At best, they will appreciate the effort, at worst, our design ideas may miss the opportun...

A focus group is not a focus group is not a focus group. People working in the development space have always been open to doing this "dirty work", sitting in circles on the floor in communities to talk to community members about their habits, needs and dreams. But toda...

As we ring in the New Year I will address something that's a bit unusual for this space. Keeping your perspective. The "directions" are simple. Write things down on paper. Store. Re-read. Repeat as often as necessary. Below, I share some insights from writing things do...