Taking it Slow

A part of my research includes gathering as much data as possible on lawyers and law students in Malawi by gender. But this has been sort of hard because of the policies regarding information security in this country. Information about test scores or admission based on ethnicity, district, and gender has been difficult to acquire. They don’t just give out this stuff. People in the Ministry of Education for example have certain set duties they accomplish in order to get paid. If we ask them to go beyond those duties, like search for information of test scores based off gender, they are working outside of the duties assigned to them. In other words, they’re doing us a favor. So, in a country where money and resources are scarce, favors don’t come for free. In order to get this information, I either have to know someone with access to it or I have to pay them. This probably wouldn’t be an issue if not for another challenge I face in asking for data.

You see, no one has really asked for this type of information before. There isn’t an established precedence of transparency in which this information is available to the public. So they just see this American girl asking questions and trying to get statistics that no one has really tried to compile before. It looks suspicious to them. My mentor/guide here told me if I start asking for this data, the higher ups will start questioning me where I got permission to ask for this info in Malawi. What am I going to do with it? How is it going to be used? Is it going to be published somewhere? Regardless of my answers, the guard of those with access to this information could go up and I may not get the basic information I need like enrollment rates. I could potentially be turned away and denied the help I need. It would not be a problem to pay someone for their extended services, but I don’t want to risk not gaining any sort of information at all if word started circulating about me.

My guide says that we have to try to garner the help of these people slowly. We can’t barge in and ask for data that is not readily available. Unfortunately, I don’t have the time to creep into this process. So, my next goal is to try to find any previous research that has this information. Perhaps someone else did have the time to slowly gain the info and I’m just missing it. We will see.