It's a No-Go...

This Friday will not be remembered as the best day of our master thesis. Today we had to bury the last hope of going to India or Bhutan next year to do our empirical data collection. Arrangement had been made to meet and cooperate with a NGO focusing on ICT4D in Delhi for at least two weeks and other things were planned but the nail in the coffin simply became lack of appropriate funding. We haven't been able to raise enough money to realise the trip in a acceptable manner where the output would become beneficial to our master thesis.

We are of course utterly disappointed but just have to accept that we couldn't fight a financial crisis amongst other things. Maybe our theoretical proposition were to abstract as well for benefactors to understand and we definitely were too naive to expect funding to come easy. It has proven very difficult to gain economic support from both governmental, non-governmental and private organisations. There are many reasons for this but I won't go into this. I will just end up saying a lot of angry things :-)

So what now? Well, besides disappointment and a bit of demotivation right now, that we need to overcome, it's actually good to finally be back on a single route. It's been very stressful and confusing not to know what would actually happen.

We are already in the process of figuring out a different angle to our data collection. We will now most likely try to collect data more indirectly and initiate contact with some Danish NGO's working with ICT4D and instead of talking to the indigenous ourselves, get their viewpoint. In the end the results of our research will be different of course but not necessarily worse. Our ambitions is just the same as five months ago. We won't be stopped that easily :-)

The good news are that we have parked our theory and framework and feel very confident about it. We have moved on to the methodology and since our data collection now will change we will work on this before Christmas and until mid-January. Hopefully data collection will be conducted, now in Denmark, during late January and early February and then analysis, synthesis and further reflection will come along.

Another good news is that we'll now be in Denmark in whole January enjoying the nice cold dark winter here. Yes, our sarcastic humor is still intact... :-)