Purpose
Supporting Pastoralism and Agriculture in Recurrent and Protracted Crises (SPARC) is a six-year (2020 – 2025) research initiative funded by the UK’s Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) focused on supporting livelihoods in the world’s most vulnerable and conflict affected countries. SPARC published a landscape study in 2022 which noted an area for future learning and research is innovations in the field of governance. One such governance innovation that has been implemented to assist pastoralists, agro-pastoralists, and farmers is the Ward Development Planning (WDP) model, which has been implemented by Mercy Corps in five counties in Northern Kenya since 2017.
The WDP intervention is focusing on strengthening and building community and county government institutions for sustainable development through the ward-based development model. The model aims to empower communities to take the lead in determining their development priorities and hold County Governments accountable for resources. Through Ward Planning Committees, the programme also aims to build stable and effective institutions and communities that can successfully manage their natural resources, such as rangelands and water, by strengthening the capacity of community and county government institutions.
Action
SPARC and Mercy Corps engaged EDI Global to implement a survey in Northern Kenya with the aim of building the evidence base related to the WDP innovation and participatory planning interventions more broadly. The project involved one main household survey activity, which was designed by Mercy Corps, and included socio-economic questions as well as various scenario-based survey experiments which focused on attitudes towards Ward Planning Committee representativeness and accountability. EDI Global designed two additional surveys for sampling purposes, the village selection survey and village sketch survey. EDI Global was responsible for leading all phases of the data collection and field work implementation.
Impact
In total, EDI Global collected data from 2,856 farming households in 50 wards across five counties in Northern Kenya: Isiolo, Marsabit, Wajir, Garissa, Turkana. We achieved a 50:50 gender split across all villages, wards and counties while maintaining a random walk sampling approach. This required significant efforts, due to the configuration of agro pastoralist communities where men are typically out with livestock during the day, while women reside in the homes. EDI Global designed robust data collection protocols and adaptive management in field to enable the 50:50 sample gender split.
The data collected will be used by the SPARC research team to compare outcomes in wards where WDP was implemented with outcomes in a matched set of comparison wards where WDP has not been implemented.
household interviews
wards across five counties in Northern Kenya
