Research & Data Collection

Before I started Telerivet, I spent two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Tanzania, working on local ICT skills in communities where a feature phone was often the only computer anyone owned. What stuck with me was not the technology itself, but how much people did with it once they could talk back instead of just receive.

Every survey methodology has a hidden assumption built into it: that the person responding can afford to respond. For organizations collecting data from rural audiences across Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia, that assumption fails constantly. An SMS reply costs money. A data connection costs more. A survey that requires either one is not measuring what your audience thinks. It is measuring who can afford to tell you.

The six weeks between ethics approval and your first survey wave are a strange period. The instrument is ready. The participant list is built. The field logistics are locked. And someone still has to figure out how to actually reach 400 farmers in western Kenya and northern Tanzania on a regular basis for the next 18 months, ask them structured questions, pay them something for their time, and bring back data clean enough to analyze.