L&T Financial Services’ Data Collection Workshop at SARVAM

Sri Aurobindo Rural & Village Action & Movement (SARVAM), in association with L&T Financial Services, conducted a one-day Data Collection Workshop for their coordinators from all the 20 villages under rural development. A ‘Digital & Financial Literacy’ project was initiated last year between SARVAM and L&T, and in continuance of it a formal agreement was signed between the two organizations recently.

As a part of this project, the first Data Collection Workshop was conducted for 30 participants on October 22, 2018, by SATTVA (the Knowledge Partner for this project). The main objective of this workshop is to help the coordinators understand the ultimate goal of the project and also to help them to conduct the Baseline Surveys in all the 20 project villages.

Mr. Rahul, Ms. Komal and Ms. Gayathri, trainers from SATTVA, visited the Satyam campus and trained the coordinators on how to collect data with any given questionnaire. The workshop started with a formal welcome address and then all coordinators introduced themselves to the visitors, which helped the trainers to understand them better.

After the introductions, the aim of the project was explained by Ms. Komal to all coordinators. Thereafter, the workshop focused on the Baseline Survey Questionnaire, which was prepared specifically for this project. Each question was read out by the coordinators and then Ms. Komal explained the meaning of the questions and the ways to ask these questions to the village populace. This helped all the coordinators to understand the nuances of collecting data from their intended audience, which here are the natives of their villages. A few queries were raised by the coordinators, for Ms. Komal and Ms. Gayathri, related to the questionnaire and those were clarified by both the trainers in detail for better understanding. Overall, 72 questions were discussed during this session and this was a very essential segment of the Workshop for the coordinators.

In the second part of the Workshop, a demo session on how to use the ‘Social Cop’ Application was explained explicitly and in an understandable manner to all coordinators. Each coordinator was given a computer tablet, and they were asked to follow the instructions to fill in the details appearing on the tab. The coordinators were then trained to fill up a sample questionnaire form in the Social Cop Application and it helped them to learn practically how to use the app and fill in the form. After the introduction, each coordinator was asked to do a mock pilot within the coordinators.

The workshop was very informative and beneficial for the coordinators, as they all understood the aim of the project and its value in their overall development. More importantly they practically learned how to conduct a baseline survey, which will prove to be very advantageous for this and other projects. It also helped them to learn how to use the Social Cop Application, with which they are now going to carry out all their data collection work.

The Workshop was a great step forward in making the coordinators more digitally aware and personally made them feel good about operating a computer app to carry out their work.