The number of things that I need to keep my eyes on at work has grown from just the Marketing Survey (which I don't think I've blogged about much). I'm still busy with the Marketing Survey now, but only in doing some data organising and report writing. We won't be running any large scale data collection in market places until January next year. My PI (Principle Investigator/Boss) Lorenzo tells me that I'll be launching the next Marketing Survey as I step off the plane on 3rd Jan, or at least around then. Linked to the Marketing Survey, I've also been managing some monthly price data collection via phone calls to agriculatural markets.
The biggest thing taking up my time right now is the Cocoa Project. Over the last 3 months I've been traveling to Kailahun plenty to set the project up and to monitor how it's going. I just arrived back from a trip to Segbwema this afternoon. In the cocoa project we are working with 84 small scale Sierra Leonean cocoa traders. We're grading the quality of their cocoa, and measuring the impact on the quality when we provide a random sample of the traders with an incentive for high quality. The status quo in the cocoa market in Kailahun is a flat commission rate, so we're interested to see what happens when we introduce an added premium for quality. The other thing we're pilotting at the moment is an "observability" project. We want to see what will happen to the quality of cocoa produced by cocoa farmers if they are better able to observe and certify the quality of their cocoa, by us training someone in the village to grade and certify it with a specially designed test. The cocoa project is preyy cool. I'm gaining some expertise in what a well fermented and well dried cocoa bean looks like, and what they taste like.
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| Putting out the cocoa beans to dry outside one of our cocoa traders' stores in Kailahun Town. This guy is using his feet to shuffle the cocoa beans. Kailahun Town was the rebel soldier capital during the war. |
The next big thing taking my time at the office is the roads project. This roads project is a strange one, because it is largely undefined. The main purpose for the Marketing Survey was to help in the evaluation of some roads, along with a bunch of other surveys. There is no neat and defined "roads project" though. Getting a good, rigorous evalution of the impact of feeder roads (small, rural roads) is probably one of the holy grails of development research. Randomised control trials with roads are difficult though, because persuading a government to randomise the allocation of road construction is tough (and doesn't happen). Instead, we use regression discontinuities and randomised phase-ins, but getting road construction workers to work on time and political interests to agree and stick to a plan is still difficult. I've been working with IFAD ("I" for international, "D" for development, I'll let you figure the rest out) to try and set up one of these projects with them. And, I'm going to be driving around a bunch of the country with a sweet wide-angle GPS video camera to film the roads built by the EU. We'll be using the video data to get some quantitative measures for the quality of the roads built (and not built) by the EU.
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| One of the rough patches on the highway between Kenema and Kailahun Town. Fatoma and I were on bikes, but we still had to walk this section. This is one of the roads that we travel on for cocoa, and is also one of the roads being rehabilitaed by IFAD. |
This blog post is far too long for me to start on my intrepid exploration. Next time.
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