I really enjoyed Hans Rosling's talk about the importance of data. I think he did a great job of demonstrating this in his presentation. The quote that really hit home for me and that I think most applies to the projects in this class is when Hans mentioned that "the improvement of the world needs to be highly contextualized. It cannot be considered at a regional perspective".
When I met with my group for the midterm, we looked at this question critically in regards to our task. Here is the task that we were given:
At first we started to solve the problem and then we realized that we needed to specifically define who the person was that we were transferring the money to. If it were to be to individuals in Africa, there are a wide spread of individuals of different demographics and access in that country. After defining the individual with the following parameters: a person who makes (household) about 60-100usd per month with no bank access. This very much helped to better approach this assignment.