Volunteering was important for enhancing my understanding of my political issue of microfinance. My NGO helped women in remote areas of South India to access microfinance. My role as a volunteer under this program started with spending the first few days familiarising myself with the self-help groups and their requirements. This was done through a booklet, that also provided my accounts of women who were successful in attaining female empowerment through microfinance. This part of the volunteering was really important because, before this, I was only aware of the broader mechanism of microfinance, and not too much about how this service actually reaches the lives of women in India. Furthermore, some details of self-help groups, such as loans acquisition and debt repayment were very specific to Pondicherry, which was important, particularly given the diversity of India that makes these figures relative to different parts of India. I think that this made me realize that I had to trim down the scope of my political issue, from one that focuses on India as a whole, to one that is specific to Pondicherry and South India. I think this will further help me by narrowing the scope of my research, to be able to analyze it better through the Glopo course. Since my experience with volunteering with microfinance was only limited to two weeks, I was unable to teach women in self-help groups skills such as managing their accounts through online software such as Microsoft Excel. Instead, I contributed through conducting personal research about the extent of microfinance in empowering women, alongside the challenges of debt management and effective investment to grow businesses. I really appreciated this flexibility of my NGO, that was more than happy to cater to my needs when needed. This personal research came in the form of travelling to remote regions outside Pondicherry to talk to women about their experiences with microfinance and if it had any noticeable impacts on their domestic/social lives (whether positive or negative). The reflection for these interviews is recorded as a separate engagement in another post. All in all, I am truly thankful for my volunteering experience with India Volunteer Care, because more than anything, it provided me with firsthand experience with microfinance at its fundamental level: with those whom it impacts.
