Youth Voices: A Review of Literature and Life

Over the past three weeks, since I was thrown into the day-to-day life of ICRISAT, I've slowly settled into a consistent schedule - filling my days with evening walks, chai, reading, and meetings. As packing my bags for Andhra Pradesh inches nearer, I've gotten to reflect and learn about the research process while preparing for the field visit on July 2nd.

In just two weeks, I will be driving seven hours to the district of Anantapur in the bordering state of Andhra Pradesh. This fieldwork will encompass all the research I've been doing this summer. It'll allow me to interview and collect first-hand conversations on the effects of accelerated benefits for different actors in the agricultural value chain. This starts with the farmers and agricultural laborers, producers, farmer producer organization (FPO) members, board directors of the FPO federation, retailers, all the way to the consumers.

For such an all-encompassing project that needs to be completed in eight weeks, one of my biggest challenges has been generating the right questions to ask when I get into focus group discussions. Before thinking about any of this, I first had to organize my overarching research question, molding it to fit within the goals of the project. What's the difference between "impact" and "effect" in my title? Well, an impact usually refers to a long-term project; I was told at ICRISAT that this generally entails studying crop varieties for 5 to even 10-year periods. Hence, I changed my word choice and swapped "impact" for "effect" instead. What types of effects are you trying to study? I decided that, since many of my questions are focusing on the objectives of the initial Walmart intervention, I need to highlight the socio-economic and nutritional ones first...[CONTINUE READING]