What am I doing here?

Several people have asked, but I’ve hesitated to write a post explaining exactly what I’m doing here because I’m a little unsure myself. Several different organizations involved in promoting agroforestry in Niger requested, through CHC, a fellow (me) to research the impact of their efforts. So broadly speaking, my project is about evaluating how successful several of these agroforestry promotion projects have been in terms of raising incomes, reducing poverty, and improving food security.

The problem I’m running into as I begin to get into the specifics is that the projects of the different organizations—3 of them, basically—are not really comparable. And because of the differences between them, each organization seems to have a different idea of how they should be evaluated. There seems to be some consensus that I’m to focus on social and economic aspects, but beyond that it’s kind of a mess. So my current challenge, and what I’ll be working with for roughly the next three months, is to learn enough about all of these systems in order to come up with some kind of broad evaluative framework that applies to all of them.

The plan is for me to spend the first year here in Niger collecting information and the second year in Benin, using that information to develop reports, papers, policy briefs, or whatever we decide the products of this research should be. Overall it's a pretty exciting opportunity. I'll probably get to travel a fair amount within Niger, and the fact that I'm working with 3 or 4 organizations (depending on how you count) rather than just one gives me a degree of independence to carry out the project the way I want.