In order to explain the lack of content on this site, i thought i’d divulge a little about what i’m doing over here. Not everything though, it’s top secret, i’ll have to knee cap you kind of stuff, so secret that i’d have to knee cap myself if i knew the secret stuff i was doing.

Above is a little screen grab from the software i’ve been programming away at. “Working on Software!?”, “Doing Programming!?” you say, “I thought you were an accountant, you studied economics right!?”. Well it’s a “Yes” to the first two, and a “half yes” to the last one. For some reason people have assumed that having studied in the economics/finance faculty, my only career path could have been accounting. “Ha” to them i say, i’m much cooler than that, my hunched back and fading eyesight can attest to the fact that i am now a quasi programmer. Quasi, because well, this is my first piece of real work, i had done something for bluejuice once, which may have resulted in emailing the same person continuously for hours, until the bluejuice site got shut down, that was intentional of course.

So back to work, my initial project was to help Binhminh obtain some kind of information system to manage their operations. Easy enough, choose some software, buy some hardware, do some training, eat some noodles, drink some rice wine and i’d be outta here. Turns out that there wasn’t much microfinance software really suited to us and available in Vietnam. There is definitely a lot out there, but when you are a predominantly Vietnamese speaking organisation with little IT resources and cashola, then your choices are limited. Limited to the extent whereby you may get the likes of me suggesting it could be a good idea for the likes of me to put something together.

To my delight, things seem to have come together, it’s likely not the greatest piece of code ever written (using PHP, a little javascript and MySQL by the way), but in its initial incarnation should be able to do the job. The job being to replace the hours and hours of manual calculations and pen and paper record keeping that takes up half of the credit officer’s time, when instead they could be engaging with our clients a little more. And engaging they shall be required to do, as one of our partners is an organisation called Kiva.

Kiva allows individuals to lend money directly to a microfinance borrower (no interest returns for the lender though, just warm fuzziness), acting as a conduit/marketplace where microfinance orgs can post their clients on the Kiva website, and individuals can invest in them, instead of losing money through the current credit crisis (if only!). However, as part of our partnership with Kiva, we have to do certain things like giving updates to investors about how our client is going, taking pretty pictures, not steal all their money and be accountable which is also why my project has taken place.

You can have a peek at what i’ve done here. Username: testmanager, Password: test. It’s not our real test site, just one especially designed for the wonderful few people who come across this blog. We are just starting to pilot the software in one of our branches at the moment, so it’s a kinda exciting rubbing my palms together kinda time.

I have given away too much, i shall track you down and knee cap you, although having knee capped myself (which i’m going to have to do now) you may just get away.

Also, if anyone out there feels as if they would like to work in improving/takeover what i have done (given my impending lack of knee caps) feel free to contact me.

So I have done a bit of work whilst over here too. Last week involved several trips to Dong Anh district, it’s a bit over an hour to get there. It’s a rural area quickly urbanising, and is where our microcredit operations take place. Work involved following a credit officer around as she visited various communes to collect and distribute money. Top left is a collection meeting held in a borrower’s house, and top right is one of our branch offices. Right is the general landscape around the district, rice paddies littered with communes. Most of the borrowers are women who sell produce in the market, the one male borrower we met is a street barber.

The credit officer has to lug around a backpack with 5 thick books for a good part of the day, through all kinds of weather, often resulting in bruised shoulders! I guess my task is to rid the burden of heavy books, so I think a giant bonfire may be in order. Here are some pics of where I had my bowl of pho for lunch on one of the days. It just wouldn’t be a post if my stomach wasn’t involved.