Maradi Journal

One of my main activities during my time here is designing and carrying out a household survey aimed at assessing the adoption and impacts of certain tree management practices. I'm planning on launching the survey at the beginning of April, and last week I was in Maradi, the region to be surveyed, gathering some last minute information and training the people who will actually be in the field administering the survey questionnaires. Since I hadn't posted anything here in ages I decided to keep a journal of my trip to give a better idea of the kind of stuff I'm involved with on a day to day basis. I had intended to post this on Monday, but my computer's been giving me trouble and I've been kind of swamped. So here it is, my Maradi journal from last week.

Sunday, March 16. The drive from Niamey to Maradi took about 11.5 hours. Every time I’ve made this trip it’s taken pretty close to 12 hours. Every time I’ve planned for this trip people have insisted that it will take a maximum of 9 or 10 hours. I’m traveling with Abdoulaye, who’s helping me with logistics, technical stuff, and most importantly the training of the enumerators who will be carrying out the surveys. He and I are taking turns driving the old Toyota pickup that we’ll be using for the week, which is much more interesting (and lighter on my limited funds) than the usual arrangement of taking an official driver on these kinds of trips. The truck has no AC so we drove all day with the windows open and my white t-shirt was a nice shade of reddish-brown by the time we arrived. On a road like this one (the country’s main highway connecting the main cities) there’s really nothing you can do to avoid regularly slamming into potholes at high speed. Because of the bumps the electric cables keep coming detached from the battery so every time we turn of the ignition we have to reattach the battery before we can continue. You can tell right away when the cable had detached because the horn, which we use frequently, stops working. Long day, but it feels good to have the trip underway and I tend to enjoy these long drives as a chance to get out and see the countryside.Monday, March 17. Maradi is noticeably cooler than Niamey. I used hot water in the shower this morning, which I haven’t done for over a month now in Niamey. We’re pretty close to the Nigerian border here—somebody told me it was less than 50 kilometers—and the influence is noticeable: a lot of people speak English here, some of the communities in this region have officially adopted Sharia law, the markets and roadsides are full of cheap (smuggled) Nigerian goods, etc.

We had a surprisingly productive morning today so we were able to take it easy most of the afternoon. Our goals for the day were to make contact with some people at the national agricultural research institute who are helping with some of our activities, to visit the director of the Ministry of Environment for this region to explain what we’re doing and try to collect some information on environmental projects that have intervened in the region, and to visit another government office that is responsible for the regional development plan to try and get a list of the important local markets in the region.

I was pretty skeptical about the latter two goals. I’m no stranger to these kinds of visits to government offices and in my experience you almost never leave with what you came for (Back in November or December, Abdoulaye and I spent three days in a row doing these visits at the national level ministries in Niamey and accomplished absolutely nothing). But luck was on our side today. Turns out the new Director of Environment for this region is somebody close to Abdoulaye’s family. Abdoulaye didn’t know he was the director until we walked in the door, but once they saw each other it was clear that the guy was going to do everything he could to help us. The information we’re looking for doesn’t currently exist in any organized form, but he’s asking all the sub-regional offices to produce this information that his office will then summarize in a list which he promised us by the end of the week.

The list of regional markets that we were looking for didn’t exist either, but the guy we spoke to turned out to be pretty helpful. He called a couple of his colleagues into the room, guys who spend a lot of time monitoring markets in the Maradi region (they have to monitor them in order to collect taxes on the transactions that occur). This group sat around for about an hour or so shouting out the names of market towns as they came to mind, until we eventually ended up with what seems like a pretty comprehensive list of about 80 markets.

Having made more progress at the government offices in a morning than I had expected we’d make all week, we were able to relax a little in the afternoon and turn our attention to the main goal of the week: finding, selecting, and training the enumerators for the household survey.

Tuesday, March 18. This morning we met with a group of 20 potential enumerators. We’re expecting to end up with 12, but we expect some attrition and it’s probable that some of those who came won’t have the skills to be able to do what we want them to. The meeting started the typical two hours behind schedule, and we spent the whole day in a hot stuffy room reading through the 2 questionnaires and trying to clarify what information we are after, not as simple a task as it might seem. Abdoulaye, who’s run these kinds of trainings before, was invaluable.

We found out today that there is a religious holiday this week and a pubic sector strike is planned for Thursday. You might think that an important religious holiday is something we obviously would have planned around, or that on Tuesday people could agree on whether the holiday is on Wednesday or Thursday, but in both cases you’d be wrong. Abdoulaye seems confident that neither of these events will mess up our schedule too much, so I’m not especially worried. We always have the option of spending an additional day or two here if necessary.

Amazingly, we got a call from the Director of Environment’s office saying the list we requested yesterday is ready for us to pick up. Abdoulaye said we would pick it up tomorrow but I insisted we go tonight (if the holiday turns out to be tomorrow, who knows if anybody will be there to give us the list). After getting the list we went to visit a village about 15 km out of town where we’re going to take our enumerators tomorrow to run a test of the survey questionnaires. We met with the Mai Gari (the chief of the village), explained what we wanted to do and got his permission.

A very long day, but another productive one.

Wednesday, March 19. Today we took our newly trained enumerators to a nearby village for a test run of the survey questionnaire. The purpose of this exercise is both to give the enumerators some practice in administering the questionnaire and to identify questions that are unclear or otherwise problematic. It’s also a chance for us to evaluate the enumerators; to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. The exercise took much longer than expected, about 4 or 5 hours per questionnaire. I was a bit discouraged by the pace of things, and by the fact that the enumerators seemed to have a lot of trouble with things I thought we had clarified on Tuesday. I guess that’s why you do the test run in the first place. Still, it was fun to see this questionnaire that I’ve been tinkering with for months actually put into action. Abdoulaye and I also went through the questionnaire with one of the farmers.

I spent all evening reviewing and “grading” questionnaires to find faults and to identify weak enumerators.

Thursday, March 20. Reconvened with enumerators to debrief on Wednesday’s exercise and discuss the problems we found with their questionnaires. This session consisted of a lot of shouting. We finished at lunchtime and spent the afternoon making a few more visits and running errands in Maradi. Abdoulaye and I met up at about 8:00 to make our final selection of enumerators and notify them.

Friday, March 21. Made pretty good time on the return trip to Niamey despite stopping to change a flat tire and then stopping again to get it repaired. Current plan is to return to Maradi a week from Sunday to launch the actual survey.