The Belgian Development Agency, BTC, and its partners turned the baseline study of the Maisha Bora programme in Tanzania into an inspiring learning process for all actors involved. Five international and ten local partners successfully worked together to carry out a common household survey. Coached by data experts and equipped with tablets and GPS-devices, local programme partners took charge of the data collection. In this way the baseline study became a leverage for digitizing development cooperation, building capacity and promoting programme ownership. 

The baseline study of the Maisha Bora programme was conducted in December 2015 and comprised an extensive household survey. By understanding the starting point of the programme, the different partners will be able to monitor and evaluate how Maisha Bora contributes to improving food security during the coming years.

To conduct the baseline study, BTC teamed up with a service provider, Savannas Forever Tanzania (SFTZ), to design a digital household survey incorporating impact indicators for all different programme components. The survey consisted of a questionnaire and anthropometric measurements to gather both quantitative and qualitative information on the food security and nutrition status of the beneficiaries at the start of the programme. The questionnaires were entered into a software programme and enumerators were sent out to the field with GPS devices and pre-programmed tablets. For Jovit Felix, programmer of SFTZ, digitising the questionnaires was an obvious choice:

“Digital questionnaires make data collection much more efficient and enumerators can minimise the time they spend on each interview. We are much more in control of data quality during data collection and we avoid encoding errors.”

Coached by data experts and equipped with pre-programmed tablets and GPS devices, local programme partners took charge of the data collection. After a four-day training on interviewing skills, anthropometric measurement techniques and how to work with the tablets and the survey software, the local partners traveled to the villages to carry out the household surveys.

All these efforts lead to a more efficient data collection. All questions were linked together in such a way that irrelevant questions were skipped automatically. After the interview, the enumerators could directly upload all the completed surveys to a server, so the data experts of SFTZ could start with data cleaning and analysis. By linking the household surveys to GPS coordinates, a data layer was added to easily map out geographical differences.

This way, digital data allow for more precise analyses on different parameters, both time-bound and geographical. This should lead to better decisions during programme implementation and, ultimately, to better results.

Read the full article on our baseline on: goo.gl/DXWzRm