Maisha Bora is a multi-actor programme financed through the Belgian Fund for Food Security. The aim of the programme is to improve the food security of (semi-)pastoral communities in 15 villages in Northern Tanzania.
The Belgian Development Agency, BTC, and its partners turned the baseline study of the Maisha Bora programme in Tanzania into an inspiring learning process for all actors involved. Five international and ten local partners successfully worked together to carry out a common household survey. Coached by data experts and equipped with tablets and GPS-devices, local programme partners took charge of the data collection. Find out how the baseline study became a leverage for digitizing development cooperation, building capacity and promoting programme ownership.
The Maisha Bora programme in a nutshell
The Maisha Bora programme (2015-2019) aims to improve the food security in Simanjiro and Longido districts in Northern Tanzania. The vast plains in these remote areas are home to pastoral and agro-pastoral communities, which mainly depend on livestock for their livelihoods. Pressure on land and available natural resources, climate change and lack of alternatives for generating income, have severely worsened the food insecurity of these communities over the past few decades.
Financed through the Belgian Fund for Food Security (BFFS), the Maisha Bora programme brings together five international and ten local development organizations to work on higher and more secured income used for nutrition and improved local availability of food for the most vulnerable and most impoverished households in the area.
The five international partners are: BTC, Vétérinaires Sans Frontières Belgium, Iles De Paix, TRIAS and the World Food Programme. The ten local partners are: Heifer, UCRT, OIKOS, LCDO, PWC, MWEDO, MVIWATA-Arusha, TCCIA Arusha, TCCIA Manyara, and Childreach Tanzania. BTC coordinates the programme. In doing so, BTC stimulates synergies and cooperation among the different partners and monitors and evaluates the impact of the programme.
Many partners, one common household survey
The Maisha Bora programme involves five international partners, which are all responsible for the implementation of a specific component together with their local partners. Within such a unique approach different organizations with expertise in nutrition, water engineering, agriculture, livestock and local entrepreneurship all work together on one common programme objective: improving food security of households in 15 targeted villages. Yet, different organizations bring along different approaches, reporting formats, monitoring and evaluation systems, indicators, etc. BTC therefore ensures that the efforts of all partners are harmonized and directed towards the common programme objective.
The same applies to the baseline study of the programme. BTC teamed up with a service provider, Savannas Forever Tanzania (SFTZ), to design a common household survey incorporating impact indicators for all different components. The survey consisted of a questionnaire and anthropometric measurements to yield both quantitative and qualitative information on the food security and nutrition status of the beneficiaries, as well as on socio-economic data about their revenues, livestock assets and their access to water.
Mathias Lardinois, programme coordinator of Maisha Bora, explains: "We decided to carry out one common household survey for our programme baseline. All partners worked together to integrate all their indicators and to make sure that there was no overlap. These efforts lead to a more efficient data collection, so our beneficiaries didn't have to go through five separate surveys."
Susan James, Executive Director of Savannas Forever Tanzania: “Designing the final household survey was a real challenge. We worked closely together with BTC and the implementing partners to harmonize the different M&E systems and to consolidate all the indicators. It was our task to turn it into a scientifically sound and workable household survey and to program it into the software.”
"The Maasai are mobile, but so are we"- David, teamleader SFTZ
Logistics are crucial
The 15 Maisha Bora programme villages are spread over a vast area in the districts of Simanjiro and Longido. The Maasai communities living in these scarcely populated plains of Northern Tanzania are mainly (agro-)pastoralists, who seasonally move around in search for green pastures for their livestock. Household dwellings (locally referred to as "bomas") are often located miles apart. By organizing one common household survey for the programme, the Maisha Bora partners made sure that the resources for the baseline survey were efficiently used and logistics were carefully organized. The team of SFTZ was up for the task. In three weeks' time the enumerators interviewed more than 920 households in 15 villages.
David Mollel, teamleader of Savannas Forever Tanzania: “The area in Longido and Simanjiro is rough. Due to the heavy rains some bridges were damaged and roads were literally washed away. Some of the villages could not be reached by car, so we had to walk for several hours. Besides, sometimes the Maasai men were still herding their cattle out of the village in the dry-season grazing lands. Others had moved to town temporarily. You know, Maasai are mobile, but so are we. In the end we reached all the bomas and interviewed more than 900 households”.
Adding value with digital tools
Digitizing development cooperation is high on the agenda of Minister Alexander De Croo. The digital wave started many years ago and finally found its way into the development programmes and projects. Maisha Bora walks the talk. The household questionnaires of the baseline were entered into a software program and enumerators were sent out to the field with GPS-devices and pre-programmed tablets.
The software programmers of SFTZ downloaded the digital questionnaires to a set of tablets. All questions were linked together in such a way that irrelevant questions were skipped automatically. After the interview, the enumerators could directly upload all the completed surveys to a server, so the data experts of SFTZ could start with data cleaning and analysis on the spot. By linking the household surveys to GPS-coordinates, a data layer was added to easily map out geographical differences.
Digital questionnaires were an obvious choice for Jovit Felix, programmer of SFTZ: "We abandoned pens and paper questionnaires many years ago. Digital tools create added value. They make data collection much more efficient and enumerators can minimize the time they spend on each interview. We are much more in control of data quality during data collection and we avoid encoding errors."
Creating programme ownership
BTC and SFTZ made sure that the local programme partners played a major role in the baseline study so they would gain ownership of the programme from the early start. Having followed a 4-day training on interviewing-skills and anthropometric measurement techniques, the local partners left to the villages to take charge of the data collection.
Lekipa, a field officer from UCRT explains: "I am very proud that the figures we see in the data analysis are the result of our hard work in the field. We learned a lot during the baseline survey, especially on interacting with the Maasai. Some questions were difficult or sensitive to ask, but now we know how to deal with such issues."
Besides of improving their interviewing-skills, the enumerators also learned to work with the tablets and the survey-software. Coached and supervised by the team of SFTZ, the local partners demonstrated their new skills in the field.
Seneth was one of the enumerators who got his first experience in using digital tools: “I'm happy I learned working with a tablet. Using these tablets made it a lot easier for us. We could do the interviews much faster. Some of our respondents were surprised to see us using these tools, but we always took the time to let them feel at ease and to show them how these tablets work.”
Putting the data to work
The baseline study is just the start of the monitoring and the evaluation of the Maisha Bora programme. By analyzing the data and understanding the starting point of the programme, all partners will be able to evaluate how their activities contribute to improving food security in the programme area during the coming five years. They will actively use the baseline data to learn, to make informed decisions and to steer the programme accordingly.
With this in mind, rich digital data bring another advantage to the programme. They allow for more precise analyses on different parameters. Programme partners will be able to map the data, use time-series of data and easily compare the results with other data sets. Altogether, this should lead to better decisions, better programmes and better results.
