Sustain Africa is implementing a project in Uganda to support farmers with discounted fertilizers to ensure sustainable planting of food and cash crops as a mechanism to improve food security and reduce poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa. Sustain Africa believes that food security and wealth creation can be attained through the effective use of fertilizers as well as other farm inputs. In Uganda and Malawi, the project is aimed at enabling smallholder farmers to access fertilizers from various distributors within different regions at subsidized or discounted prices.
ICED’s support role in the project was to lead the implementation of field data collection from beneficiary farmers and agro-dealers.
The study intended to survey a total of 441 farmers, located in all the three geographical regions, who were interviewed during a baseline survey conducted in December 2022 using telephone-based interviews. In all, 370 farmers were successfully interviewed translating into a success rate of 83.9%. Out of the 441 respondents, 61 or 13.8% were unreachable after several call attempts; 5 (1.1%) declined, stating that they were unwilling to take part in the study; 2 phone numbers (0.5%) were barred from receiving calls or were no longer active while 3 (0.7%) did not exist or ceased to belong to the targeted respondents, i.e. the current owners were not part of the survey.
To achieve a 100% survey success rate, a replacement list from 11 districts was provided and 74 respondents were sampled for interview.
ICED has strengthened its capacity in implementing Agile data approaches for innovation and monitoring within Africa. With the lessons learned from past experiences, ICED is ready to efficiently drive the need for Agile data approaches in data collection and policy making in Africa. ICED is in the process of identifying projects under its umbrella of initiatives (especially those relating to ALL-IN and Horticulture Innovation Lab) where Agile data approaches can be applied.
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