Pro tips for designing and deploying complex agricultural surveys

When working on evaluations of agricultural development projects, it is extremely important to get high quality data at the plot level of the farm. Since farmers in developing countries often have fragmented landholdings, data must be collected on multiple plots on which farmers might potentially grow different crops and employ different practices. As part of an evaluation of a training-of-trainers program on integrated soil fertility management, our team conducted two surveys in Ghana’s Volta region. This post shares some best practices using the mobile data collection platform SurveyCTO, based on our experiences in Ghana and other countries.

Photo: Simrin Makhija/IFPRI