Needs Assessment

We have been here for just over a week and, although we do not have a lot to report, we do want to provide an update on our activities during this past week.  It has been a busy week, with four of the past five days spent ‘in the bush’!  In the context of Niger, that means travelling to and spending time in small villages in more rural areas of the country where World Renew’s development partner is active.

As we mentioned in our first blog, the first step in this assignment is to help with the preliminary needs assessment and, depending on the results of that, with pre-project planning and proposal writing.  Consequently, our first week has focused on initiating the needs assessment via a fairly comprehensive survey that will explore such things as the size and composition of families (households); meals per day; the nutritional content of those meals; how the food is acquired (their own crops, purchasing, borrowing, begging, in exchange for labour, etc.); how much of their total spending or borrowing is for food; and the types of things they have to resort to in order to survive (things like selling their assets, their animals, borrowing money, sending children to eat elsewhere, eating seed stocks that were to be used for next planting season, etc.).  The survey, initiated in English, had to be translated into French and then into a local language prevalent in the villages.  Since the survey will canvas 26 villages involving three different language groups, enumerators had to be selected who could speak at least one of these.

This almost sounds do-able but the real challenge comes with the need to define what we mean by such concepts as “meal”, “household” and “acreage” (land size). Before we could even begin to train the enumerators on how to gather the information on the survey we needed to spend significant time on understanding the terms.

To define a “meal” involved much discussion – which contents constitute a meal, what size portion is considered to be a meal, and a favourite definition: “how many times did your wife put food on your plate?”  Eventually the winner was a word in a local language that captured: “eating with the goal of filling”.

Next challenge – what is a ‘household’?  There was almost consensus that a household includes all those living within a ‘concession’ – a grouping of huts situated within a loosely fenced area. This houses the complete nuclear family living in this enclosure. Others however felt it should be defined as the number of people who eat from the same cooking ‘pot’, while yet others suggested it should be the group of people who eat from the same granary (the structure where harvested crops are stored). Eventually it was concluded that a household consists of a man and his one or more wives, his children and others who have become his responsibility

We are also interested in knowing how much land a household owns.  Each man can own several parcels of land and his wife may have her own garden area as well. Unfortunately, people do not know how many acres or hectares they own.  They do know the dimension of their land in terms of ‘steps’ – and each step is estimated to be about one metre. With a very high illiteracy rate, there are minimal math skills even among our enumerators.  On the survey they will write down the number of “steps x steps” in each plot and we will then have to convert these into hectares.

After two days of finalizing the survey and thorough training, our enumerators did a trial run by surveying twelve villagers. Each interview takes just over one hour but the surveys were well done and we are thankful that the enumerators have successfully applied what they learned. Surveying 350 households in 26 villages will take until the end of next week, after which there will be data entry and analysis.  In the meantime, we will use the time to conduct some focus groups, to do a market assessment, to meet with various government officials in the area and to plan next steps.

On a personal level, we are doing well.  We have a good place to stay, we are healthy, and coping well in the extreme heat.

Thank you so much for your ongoing interest in our work and for your prayers.