Upper Rio Minho baseline for ESSA and the IDB

ESSA Technologies and the Inter-American Development Bank needed a baseline of farmers in the Upper Rio Minho watershed before later evaluation work. They needed interviews on the farms, face to face, and a focus-group script beside the questionnaire. In 2018 Balcostics Research was the prime field contractor.

Interviewers worked in the watershed and spoke with farmers in person. The completed fieldwork is about 500 farmers. We recruited those interviewers, trained them on the instrument, and supervised the fieldwork until the file was ready for the evaluators. The focus-group script was in the same contract, alongside the quantitative interviews. ESSA and the IDB kept the evaluation design. We held the field contract and delivered the file they used.

About 500 farmer interviews were completed, face to face, in the Upper Rio Minho in 2018, with the focus-group script fielded alongside them. That is the baseline we ran. The role was prime field contractor.

Use this job when you want a Jamaican firm to hold the field contract on an agricultural baseline. When you want Balcostics under your own contract instead, read the Child Protection Compact case. There we were the local subcontractor on a baseline and again on the endline. To scope a new baseline, use the monitoring and evaluation page. Send the sample size, the mode, the geography and the timeline. Say whether you need groups as well as the farmer interviews, as this baseline did. Include the year you need the teams in the field.