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In the realm of development cooperation, project donors– ultimately taxpayers, in most cases– increasingly demand accountability about outcomes and impact. This requires specific competencies and solutions from the implementers of development projects and programmes.
Project management includes meticulous tracking of inputs and outputs. The outcome describes how the outputs are put to use by direct project beneficiaries and by the people they interact with. This calls for a more complex project design. The project work plan has to include the collection and management of data for measuring outcomes.
A case from Ghana
The outputs of AFC’s MSME Finance Project in Ghana are trainings delivered to a target number of 2,000 MSMEs, financial products adapted or newly developed, and the number of MSMEs who signed up for each of these new products, i.e. from the financial institution perspective, number of sales.
The project is part of a comprehensive ‘Programme for Sustainable Economic Development (PSED)’, through which GIZ, funded by BMZ, supports improvements in several economic sectors in Ghana. In other words, GIZ aims for outcomes and impact, to which the project outputs contribute. To track these, it is not enough to count trainees. We also have to collect information from the trainees on how they have used the training input in managing their finances and more broadly in running their enterprises.
Regularly, a core challenge is the organization of a survey that balances quality requirements with available time and financial resources. Survey design is a complex competency that spans methods knowledge, research instrument development skills, field research ethical standards’ awareness, and organizational savviness akin to a campaigner.
One way of accessing such a set of competencies is to contract a provider of automated survey techniques. AFC repeatedly successfully partnered with Viamo who have experience in delivering surveys in many African countries.
One of their solutions are digital surveys via Interactive Voice Response (IVR). Through a collaborative approach with partners, their surveys are designed to be mobile-friendly formatted survey questions. It is prudent to translate and record the designed survey instrument in the local languages of the targeted sample. Eventually, the recorded survey is programmed on the Viamo platform. A series of testing with the partner and some selected farmers from the sample are performed to establish fundamental modes of launching the survey, such as the best day or time to call the target group. Based on these insights, calls are structured to be sent out from the Viamo system accordingly. The participants also get the chance to use a callback feature to engage in the survey at a convenient time, if they miss out on the calls.
Participants engage with the IVR survey by listening to questions and pressing numbers on their mobile phones which correspond to their answers. By doing so, responses are collected directly from the participants and the data becomes readily available for viewing on the Viamo platform and sharing with partners in record time. The advantages of this approach are rather obvious:
- It is much easier logistically to carry out the survey, even in remote areas.
- It is not hampered by COVID19-caused contact restrictions, and it is not affected by security concerns for human research assistants moving about.
- At the same time, it is not subject to errors or temptations for fraud that poorly trained or paid research assistants may have.
- The IVR technology can be executed on all mobile phone devices, whether smart, feature or basic, for no costs, and requires minimal efforts from farmers to use.
However, there are reservations if such an approach can work well with rural respondents. AFC and Viamo found that it does indeed, if the survey is properly prepared. For instance, in our project in Nigeria (click here for more information), Viamo interviewed about a thousand respondents, for three years in a row. In the first year, the response rate was on the low side. They further investigated and found that most of these farmers were unfamiliar with the program, while others were new to IVR. Subsequently, the team implemented two measures to drive up the response rate:
1. They ensured that at each training, participants were informed explicitly about the form of the survey, that they might receive an automated call, and what that would be like.
2. In the week before the actual survey, the sampled respondents were called to inform them and to answer any questions they might have (‘pre-survey sensitization’).
Together, these strategies worked very well, and the response rates* rose to 80% and above.
* A note on response rates:
Viamo tracks different ‘response rates’: The pickup rate as the proportion of those called who pick up; the completion rate both at pickup and at eligibility (e.g. if the respondent on the phone did not participate in our training, she was not eligible). Furthermore, it is a standard to ask the respondent if they are willing to participate in the survey. A project, naturally, is interested in the completion rate of those eligible. The different perspectives on the response rate allow managing the survey to achieve a high completion rate.
At AFC, we have found in different projects in Africa that it is ill-guided to assume that mobile-phone-based surveys cannot work with rural respondents. Indeed, their familiarity with such technologies may often well be higher than among average German communities. Reliability of network infrastructure is an issue to be considered carefully, obviously that is true for any place.
The success of such an approach is embedded in an overall thorough project management framework that allocates ample resources to design and execution of high quality of the survey. AFC has built that competency (click here for more information). Its partnership with Viamo is one of the building blocks to run successful as well as resource-efficient surveys to track project outcomes.
Visit https://viamo.io/services/surveys/ to learn more about Viamo’s work and how it connects with hard-to-reach markets using digital surveys. More case studies about their services can be found here.
For further information, please contact: priscilla.obeng [at] viamo.io () or Oliver.Schmidt [at] afci.de ()