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A baseline survey for crowdsourcing crop improvement and climate adaptation in Central America

Characterisation of rural households: a baseline survey for crowdsourcing crop improvement and climate adaptation in Central America

Overview

This is the baseline survey from the project "Crowdsourcing crop improvement: Evidence base and Outscaling model" which has that “Smallholder farmers increase the productivity of common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris) through the use of improved varieties suited to their conditions.” The survey was conducted across the Trifinio region, a border area between El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.

Methodological approach

We identified 148 communities across the study area. The criterion for selection was whether a known community organization would be able to provide household training in the selected communities. In each community, we randomly selected households based on predetermined quota from lists of households provided by the community organizations. If households did not exist (due to death or migration) or no member of the household could be interviewed after three attempts, it was replaced with another household following a predetermined order of replacement households.

We interviewed 2331 households across Trifinio. We used two formats, a short survey focused on the socioeconomic aspects, food security, bean knowledge and production. And a long survey, containing all questions from the short survey plus questions from the RhoMIS (Rural Household Multiple Indicator Survey) approach¹, which consists in a standardized survey for the characterization of rural households for climate adaptation interventions. In each community, two households were randomly assigned to the long format, while the other households followed the short format.

Data were recorded electronically using Open Data Kit (ODK), an Android-based electronic data collection system. Location points (latitude and longitude) were also recorded using the GPS of the Android devices used in this study.

Ethical aspects

The questionnaire was submitted for consideration to the Western Institutional Review Board (WIRB). The WIRB offers services to prestigious US universities. WIRB determined the survey was exempt from IRB clearance. The submission to WIRB included a description of the anonymization procedure, which will involve a pooling of the geographical coordinates to the centroid of each local community.

Grant information

This research was supported by cooperative agreement AID-OAA-F-14-00035, which was made possible by the generous support of the American people through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

References

1. Hammond, J., Fraval, S., van Etten, J. & Suchini, J. G. et al. The Rural Household Multi-Indicator Survey (RHoMIS) for rapid characterisation of households to inform climate smart agriculture interventions: Description and applications in East Africa and Central America. Agricultural Systems 151, 225–233 (2017).

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