Data collection

Household and large-scale surveys

Nationally representative and district surveys of households, schools, facilities and sites, stratified across Sierra Leone’s regions and run on tablets with KoboToolbox or SurveyCTO.

The largest is under way now: a nationally representative household survey for the Global Development Network on who Sierra Leone’s digital ID system reaches. Both tools work offline, so an interview in a village with no signal is recorded exactly as one in Freetown would be.

Qualitative fieldwork

In-depth and key informant interviews, focus groups, observation, oral history and participatory methods, run by researchers who speak the language of the room.

We record, transcribe verbatim and translate in-house, so a client receives what people actually said, not a field officer’s summary of it.

Participatory, peer and sensitive research

Our enumerators and district coordinators live in the regions where the work happens, and interview in English, Krio, Temne, Mende, Fula and Limba.

Safeguarding, informed consent and assent are built into every protocol. Where the subject calls for it, the people affected take part in the research itself: persons with disabilities interviewing other persons with disabilities, community leaders mapping who holds power, adolescents followed over several years.

Records and administrative data

Much of what a country knows sits in paper registers. We extract, digitise and check facility and programme records, so years of routine data can be analysed alongside new fieldwork.