Business Partnerships for Global Goals COVID-19 Vulnerable Supply Chain Facility Business Partnerships as a Force for Good Learning Series
Business Partnerships as a Force for Good Learning Series Remote survey tools for capturing farmer and worker information are here to stay Learning Brief 3 By Karen Smith, Agriculture Lead, Business Partnerships for Global Goals (BP4GG) programme
Business Partnerships for Global Goals is a UKAid funded programme implemented by Mott MacDonald, with support from Accenture Development Partnerships and IIED. We partner with UK and international retail brands, not-for-profit organisations, farms, and factories to provide economic, social, and health benefits to around 1 million vulnerable women and men impacted by COVID-19 in Africa and Asia.
COVID-19 has accelerated the use of remote monitoring tools The COVID-19 pandemic has drastically constrained travel in a way that we have not experienced before in our globalised world. The Business Partnerships for Global Goals programme has four partnership projects in agricultural supply chains across five African countries under its COVID-19 Vulnerable Supply Chains Facility (VSCF)¹. While these projects have been trying to understand and address the requirements of those most in need, lockdowns and curfews have made visits to farms very difficult. The pandemic has also interrupted routine information flows used to monitor the wellbeing of workers and farmers at the base of supply chains, such as audits. The use of remote surveys to serve these purposes has therefore been an essential means of capturing data on African producers, workers and farmers during the pandemic.
Learnings presented at BP4GG agriculture sector learning event on 20th April 2021. Attended by the following Vulnerable Supply Chain Facility partners: • &Wider • 60 Decibels • Ethical Trading Initiative • Fairtrade • Partner Africa • Tesco • Mondelez • Union Roasted • Morrisons
How has the VSCF used remote data collection for its agriculture portfolio? The VSCF team started finding travel to projects difficult during the pandemic, and indeed only two trips for the agriculture portfolio have been possible in the first ten months of the programme. For this reason we work with remote data collection tools for monitoring, evaluation and learning through 60 Decibels who are supporting with remote ‘rapid validations’ (RVs) and final evaluations across our partnership projects. To deliver these RVs, the team has worked closely with partners to select the sample size and design questionnaires. To date, three of these RVs have been delivered, and the results have been helpful to capture early signs of impact prior to the project endlines, as well as to steer implementation and decision making by our partners. They have also helped us collect useful data for internal reporting, decision making, knowledge sharing and learning across the portfolio of projects. To expand the VSCF team’s knowledge of remote survey tools we held a cross-agriculture portfolio event on the topic on April 20th 2021 as part of the BP4GG ‘Business as a Force for Good’ Learning Series. This event investigated how these tools - primarily those enabled by mobile technology - have been used to help deliver both our projects and similar initiatives, how effective they are, and whether they are likely to remain popular in the longer run ‘post-COVID-19’.
Deep dive into two remote data collection tools We were delighted to have presenters at our event from two expert service providers, &Wider and 60 Decibels to share their insights into how their tools are designed and deployed.
their everyday lives. To ensure the validity of information gathered, Lea explained that coached or manipulated answers could be picked up by the system’s algorithms. &Wider appreciate that their system currently gathers only quantitative monitoring data to answer the “what [is happening]?” question. This is a conscious design choice in order to keep the system scalable, quick to deploy, actionable and cost effective. The approach works most effectively when used alongside other tools such as social audits, social dialogue and qualitative interventions that generate answers to the “why” question through stories, context, histories and suggested solutions. 60 Decibels, incubated by Acumen and spun out two years ago, also use phone calls to collect information directly from individuals, primarily to deliver impact measurement and customer feedback surveys. Co-founder Tom Adams is a big fan of the use of randomised control trials for causal evaluations to understand what works. He sees the kind of benchmarking (or ordinal impact) that 60 Decibels delivers as highly complementary, focussing as it does, not only on what is working, but also what is working best. Tom has seen benchmarks change how organisations respond to data – e.g. by ranking their performance against their peers. He shared an example from 60 Decibel’s COVID-19 research - a four month study of Kenyan farmers which showed the decline of farm activities during the pandemic and the corresponding decrease in their financial wellbeing, with the rise in input prices being a key trigger. These insights can inform donor programmes and impact investors as to where to focus efforts to support farmers.
Lea Esterhuizen, founder of &Wider, explained that the company’s “Direct Worker Reporting” approach uses five minute calls with 20 simple questions. Workers never use their voice or mention their name or tell a story – guaranteeing anonymity. Workers responses then drop onto traffic light dashboards, where every site is classified as either red, amber or green. The number and timing of data cycles are determined by client needs. The &Wider platform also has the capability to gather data via web-based surveys and WeChat. &Wider’s anonymous insights serve a number of purposes including enhancing social audits, for due diligence and for investigations. One of the guiding principles behind the company’s approach is to focus on inclusive technologies – those that enable the most workers or community members to participate, and a light user experience – one that allows anyone, even illiterate workers or community members to report on
Figure 1: &Wider - how listening technologies can extend impact
¹ The VSCF is a rapid COVID-19 response fund set up by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), and managed by Mott MacDonald Ltd. The Facility partners with 20 UK and international retailers and brands, and 7 not-for-profit organisations, supporting over 100 suppliers across Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Myanmar, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe. It will provide economic, social, and health benefits to around 1 million women and men directly and indirectly.
How have remote survey tools been used and what are user views? We also heard from two VSCF agricultural implementation partners who have extensive experience in data collection in the African agricultural context, Fairtrade and Partner Africa. Emilie Paradiso, Head of Advisory at Partner Africa, trialled the use of remote data collection for some of their advisory services work after the pandemic restricted travel to African sites. She found that there was a notable benefit in hearing directly from a large proportion of a workforce, for example in their research into the impact of COVID-19 on African SMEs which was supported by &Wider. The approach can also help identify key areas of risk before undertaking deeper investigations. However, Emilie recommended in-person research to collect qualitative information and provide triangulation should be gathered in parallel if at all possible. Partner Africa also had to develop an approach to ‘virtual audits’ over the past year. They found that risk areas such as wage and benefits, working hours and management system issues, were readily identified, but that more sensitive issues and aspects of health and safety compliance, were much harder to uncover. Emilie also reported that the virtual audits were as time intensive as in-person visits and quite demanding for clients to undertake, so Partner Africa will only continue to use them where visits to suppliers are not feasible, e.g. in fragile or conflict states.
Fairtrade have principally used mobile technology to support gathering information for monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL) on their projects, and MEL specialists Rachel Wadham and Alastair Stewart, provided their assessment of remote tools based on experiences with &Wider, 60 Decibels and On Our Radar. A challenge that can arise for remote / digital data collection is navigating local data protection laws there is no uniform approach to data protection in Africa, unlike GDPR in Europe, and countries are starting to introduce their own individual systems which can lead to additional processes. Some suppliers also have limited understanding of data protection issues which can lead to either reluctance to share any data or, at the opposite extreme, risks of data mismanagement. Worker safeguarding is another important consideration - sensitive questions should not be asked in remote surveys. The Fairtrade team echoed Partner Africa’s view that while ‘lean data’ approaches can be rapidly deployed and repeatable, they will not replace an indepth qualitative survey. The use of closed questions and standardised tools by service providers need to be carefully balanced with the requirements of implementation partners who will have project indicators that need a bespoke set of questions. This standardisation of tools, however, adds value by offering benchmarking of survey results against wider data sets.
60__ decibels
% of respondents reporting decrease
Reduction in Key Farm Activities: Last Two Weeks
94% 77% 73% 65%
78% 69%
60%
47%
June
July
57% 67% 65%
45%
63%
44%
39%
August
September
Days of Hired Labour
Amount of Inputs Purchased
Produce Harvested
Produce Sold
Figure 2: 60 Decibels study of 2,066 Kenyan farmers shows increasing challenges as the pandemic progressed
What are the principle benefits and drawbacks? Are these tools here to stay? As we wrapped up the event we asked participants for their views. The two biggest hurdles were perceived to be access to technology – e.g. workers, and particularly farmers, having access to mobile phones – and the difficulty of collecting qualitative data. To mitigate the lack of phone ownership, some suppliers opt to have a central dedicated phone line for surveys which workers can all use. Suppliers and workers can also be hesitant about sharing their details, so &Wider uses ‘opt in’ and ‘opt out’ approaches to engaging workers, and can use incentives to ensure a representative sample is achieved. Our audience felt that the greatest advantages of remote data collection were that it can be rapidly deployed and easily scaled. In addition, surveys can be repeated at low cost, enabling trends to be tracked over time, and all information is anonymous which reduces concerns around data protection. It is clear that COVID-19 has forced businesses and NGOs to expand their use of remote survey tools. Increasingly suppliers are now sharing the cost of surveys with retailers, reflecting the value of the feedback they are receiving from workers. Ultimately, there is no right or wrong way to collect data – there are many tools and the key is to pick those best matched to needs - but it is clear that mobile technology tools are here to stay. In the words of Tom Adams, “why was there ever so much doubt?”!
Figure 3: Word cloud of perceived benefits of the use of remote farmer and worker surveys
Business Partnerships as a Force for Good Learning Series VSCF Vision “To enable vulnerable people and supply chains to recover from and remain resilient to the economic and social impacts of COVID-19, by leveraging the reach and influence of responsible businesses through partnerships.” VSCF Mission “To enable recovery and resilience from the COVID-19 pandemic by forming strategic partnerships with global businesses. Working within supply chains in Africa and Asia, we will test and scale approaches to provide additional health and safety support, increase incomes, safeguard jobs, and ensure continuing access to markets. We will support vulnerable people within supply chains to recover from COVID-19, and support responsible businesses to build on these experiences to become more sustainable.”