Assessing rural needs : a manual for practitioners

During that time ACCION/AITEC developed a low-cost, rapid system of data collection for policymakers to determine conditions in rural communities and their priority development needs. The manual is divided into two parts: the research project and the "cookbook." Part one discusses development goals, linkages between research and policymaking, choosing variables, data collection, secondary information sources, writing and testing the questionnaire, project administration, and training of interviewers, coders, and analysts. The "cookbook" includes the questionnaire, coding procedures, systems for establishing priorities, and formats for report preparation of community profiles and county summaries. The cookbook is not usable in its entirety in other projects; however, it has enough common elements with other rural projects to serve as a model. Over the life of the project, the IFAM/AITEC team developed the research methodology based on group interviews with community leaders and carried out interviews in 860 communities, all of which have populations over 200. These communities are located in 56 of the 80 counties of Costa Rica, which include 96.5% of the surface land area and 54% of the population. Based on the results of these surveys, this system establishes basic social and economic trends in migration, employment, and agricultural production; inventories infrastructure, services, rural enterprises, and small community businesses; indicates the magnitude of development problems; establishes priorities for development projects between regions, counties, and communities; indicates perceived community priorities for development projects; and a provides a baseline against which program effectiveness can be measured by comparing the number, type, and location of projects completed compared to the needs established by the research program.