Monica Dashen

Somalia is experiencing a drought that has affected the educational system, leading to high dropout rates among children, a low number of teachers, and school closures. Data are needed to track the effects of the drought on school-aged children and help foreign aid workers coordinate food supplies.

To fill this gap, a Somali official and I constructed a school drought survey whereby school officials will be asked to report the number of school closings, student absences, meals delivered, and educational supplies received. We also drafted a supplementary survey involving parents of school-aged children to confirm the school officials’ reports. Parents will be asked about their children’s health and dietary habits, school status, and aid received.

When designing and implementing a survey in a crisis situation, a survey methodologist may find standard tasks to be more challenging (particularly in developing countries). For example, trained and experienced interviewers may not be readily available at the time of implementation, and the methodologist will have to take time to train a group of novice interviewers and vet their English-speaking skills. To obtain an interviewer job, for example, candidates may say they speak and understand English better than they actually do. Here are five lessons I learned while trying to implement a school drought survey:

1. Asking foundational questions about sanitation is important.

A survey designer should not limit questions to aid distribution, student enrollment, and school status. Instead, the designer must paint a broader picture of the crisis and ask about the school toilets and water source functionality. Unclean water is often the source of cholera and other diseases. In Somalia, the drought may eliminate clean water sources and force people to drink unclean water.

Likewise, sanitation habits and bleach availability are important topics to assess. For instance, in rural areas, cholera is difficult to treat, as it requires truckloads of intravenous (IV) fluid for those patients who suffer from severe dehydration. Rural clinics simply do not have a ready supply of IV fluid for a large number of patients. Also, the roads leading to these clinics are in poor condition, thereby limiting access to large trucks. Such roads and distances make prevention all the more critical, and clean water and good sanitation habits are preventative methods.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends bleach—a water treatment—be available in every village, as bleach is easy and cheap to produce in any country. (In many American homes, water is chlorinated at the source and does not need to be purified at the tap.)

2. Asking gender-specific questions is important.

The survey designer should ask about the number of boys and girls enrolled by grade level. In Somalia, boys, who are viewed as “future bread winners,” are encouraged to pursue their education more so than girls. Typically, more boys attend secondary school than girls. To encourage more Somali girls to attend school, an NGO recommends providing scholarships, solar lanterns for night time studying, sanitary kits, job-training skills, and a greater number of female instructors. A survey designer may consider inquiring about incentives used to keep the children (particularly girls) in school during the drought.

The survey designer may also want to collect data on the number of single-gender toilets per school. Not only are toilets a sanitation issue, but toilets are a school enrollment issue, too. Girls drop out of school due to the lack of single-sex toilets. Some girls have experienced violent attacks in a mixed-gender bathroom. When an NGO or government official installs a single-gender bathroom in a school, for example, the teachers may use it for themselves while the girls continue using the unisex bathroom.

3. Designing the questionnaire can be trickier than expected.

The designer may find some questions to be seemly straight forward to draft, but require multiple rewrites. The “change in dietary habits after a crisis” question is one such example. Asking about the number of meals eaten per day, or whether one has eaten enough, is ineffective. Rather, the type of food eaten and how it differs after the drought is key, along with where the food was obtained. The designer should find out whether the food is home-grown, donated, or store-bought. Likewise, the designer may find it difficult to ask people about their job and income. For example, farmers who are unable to grow food may still report working after a disaster. Once a farmer, always a farmer.

4. Obtaining a detailed map of drought-affected areas is difficult.

Unlike a hurricane that strikes in a clear location, the Somali drought is gradually spreading throughout the country. Some areas are more affected than others. To the best of my knowledge, detailed maps depicting the drought severity of villages or towns are difficult to obtain or nonexistent. As a result, the team and I had to rely on the villagers to tell us about the severity of the drought. Interestingly, simply asking the people about the last time it rained did not provide a full picture of the drought. Instead, we asked people to describe the (1) rate of rain fall—sheets or drizzle, (2) soil moisture, and (3) last time it rained. Another way involves physically analyzing the ground water.

5. Implementing a survey has security risks.

Having a security guard accompany the team in the field is prudent after any disaster. That is, the act of asking people about aid after a disaster and how they are doing can enrage them, particularly if they are hungry and homeless. Likewise, a methodologist should be present at the time of implementation to make sure the interviewers follow proper survey protocol. With the political unrest in certain areas of Somalia and lingering anti-American sentiment, it is difficult for a non-Somali like me to be present at implementation. For example, the team’s visits to schools around Mogadishu would require an SUV, security team of three persons, guide, and driver, so it was unclear whether the interviewers and I would find a seat in this SUV.

To extend our reach outside of Mogadishu and the state capitals, the team and I could conduct a phone survey of school officials listed in the national registry. Somalia has about 50% phone coverage, and people don’t have to pay to receive a phone call. However, our reach would be limited for three reasons. First, phone coverage is lower in rural areas than urban. Second, people do not always keep their phones “on” so as to save power. And third, people sometimes do not have the money to pay their phone bills. Providing phones along with phone credit to survey participants is a “work around” practiced by other researchers, but it comes with its own problems (e.g., the participants sell their phones for cash).

To determine where in Somalia the team and I could go with a reduced security risk, I looked at what other researchers did. I learned we could simply go to Somaliland, an autonomous region to the north of Mogadishu. This region has been fairly stable and even has its own currency. There is also a World Health Organization contact there. A census pre-count was done in this region, along with work on mobile money usage, reasons for piracy, and opinions toward the new government. Still, security precautions are needed, given the drought.