Purpose
The Improving Rural Access in Tanzania (IRAT) programme, funded by the United Kingdom’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, aimed to improve existing rural roads via the construction of bridges, drifts and culverts, the raising of embankments and the improvement of running surfaces on steep slopes to address specific bottlenecks. The study assessed the socioeconomic characteristics of households affected by the road improvements, as well as the effects of the programme in terms of agricultural development and access to markets and basic services.
Action
EDI Global was responsible for developing the evaluation framework design, data collection, data cleaning and data analysis. A key task during the study was tracking the households that had participated in the baseline survey three years before. EDI Global tracked 99.8% households from baseline to endline, with an endline response rate of 92.3% (the majority of households that were not interviewed had migrated outside of the baseline village). This was achieved by a combined approach of phone and in-field tracking using a wide range of contact and location information we had collected at baseline.
Impact
EDI Global conducted a vast number of interviews with a multitude of respondents across the two survey rounds, including:
interviews with households
market prices surveys in 19 markets
focus group discussions
Based on the study, EDI Global’s team published the following blog post on the importance of planning good tracking tools in baseline surveys:
Views from the Field No. 4 | Keep successfully on track: Utilising tracking tools in baseline surveys https://edi-global.com/tracking-survey/
