Hello America!  I’m back, so feel free to call, write or send candy-grams.  Especially the candy-grams.  It is a bit strange being back here in the land of the free and extremely comfortable, but it’s good too.  I’ve been enjoying taking warm showers, drinking cold milk and nursing my sense of entitlement back to health. 

Here is the link to my Final Report.  Feel free to read the whole thing if you like, or just skim the cool diagrams I made. 

A summary of its contents might look something like this: I was supposed to find out why more women were not participating in Esperanza in La Barquita.  I found that the most important reason which Esperanza had any control over was the solidarity groups: the groups of five women who guarantee each other’s loans in lieu of collateral.  It is very difficult to form a group with women you trust enough and who you believe will succeed in business.  According to group contract theory, the safest most trustworthy borrowers will find each other first, leaving the more risky ones to fend for themselves.  Thus the second group will be more risky than the first, the third more so than the second and so on.  This means each group will also take more time to form than the one that formed before it.  Given this information I suggested that the group formation process is difficult in an urban area like La Barquita, where social ties are looser than in the country, and that Esperanza’s expectations should be changed accordingly. 

My actual report contains much more information, and in a more nuanced manner than that, but I think that was the most important part.