Approaches followed & lessons learned- Group Feedback -Chelanko Keble SLATE Training for Africa RISING / NBDC Addis Ababa / Jeldu April 2013

Approaches followed to Identify Livelihoods Asset Indicators  Introduction with the farmers  Briefing - 14 men and 6 women farmers, why we were there including the details of the five livelihood capital assets  Gave them the chance to reflect back their views/understanding  Group formed (men and women ) using two facilitators  Explanation about each livelihood capital assets continued to create good understanding among the farmer group

Approaches…  The indicators were listed by the farmers through interactive discussion  Back from the field, the group sat together, discussed, analysed and combined the indicators from the groups. Discussion of the group during rewriting helps to understood the indicators  Data entered and then HH Livelihood indicators produced/printed for the household interview exercise

Strategy for Conducting HH interview  We discussed among ourselves and briefed the local facilitators how to forward the questions to respondent to get reliable weighting/scoring in relation to the relevance and contribution of each asset  We tried to pretest (demonstrate) how to handle the activity with some interviewers  Interview continued through systematic explanation and encouragement of the respondent to well understood how to rate each indicator

Data Entry and Cleaning efforts  We jointly start data entry to learn from each other especially how to work well with the tool  We shared the questionnaire among ourselves, hence everyone got the chance to work on it  As there was no general pretest exercise, some of the unclear/misunderstood were noted from the few questionnaires entry  We brought forward some of the issues for discussion while we were heading to the next day interview exercise  Avoiding irregularities/misunderstanding were possible

Observations  Adequate time is significant for indicator development (typing and printing)  Pretesting helps the enumerator reach common understanding and internalize the indicators and how to forward questions to the respondents  Based on the level of farmers understanding the HH interview demands minutes but the indicator development could aspires about 2 hour  For indicator identification involving knowledgeable farmers seems very important to tap their experiences  Data cleaning is important before data entry.

Desirable points  Good if we could clearly identify the main livelihood assets of specific kebel/group  We need to learn how to prepare a report after the LA is prepared  Good if we know what software is ideal to analyse the data further  Good to know how to identify issues that need intervention from the LA analysis  Good to have descriptive output by the tool itself  The result of benchmarking analysis: bottom-average- top- …should be clearly understood by all  LH spider web dimension where deficient, adequate and surplus of indicators value laid should be known for quick understanding and action.

Suggestion/question for discussion  Selection criteria for HH interview should be consistent throughout (gender representation and typology) could be important component  Is it possible to focus on few villages with in a Keble so that census targeting the typology can be conducted for random sampling of HH respondents?  Is that possible to change the incentive to in kind or material than the monetary one? For the actual sites where the intervention is going to be done, it is not fair to incentivize farmers in monetary bases for their contribution as the inputs/actual work/ would follow the exercise. However, for our exercise the incentive was fair to compensate for their time  For the actual LA work for Africa RISING sites, adequate time is needed for mobilization and participant identification…  It is good to Learn how to merge data entered on different computer

Challenges  Lack of uniformity in forwarding questions to the respondent (language and other…) barrier  Farmers temptation by the incentive  Suspicion of farmers on reporting their resource endowment  Lack of adequate time for pretesting and reaching common understanding among the trainees  Repeated data gathering from a HH  Gender representation in the HH??

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