General Household Survey-Panel 2010-2011 (PostHarvest)

First Round (Wave one)

Towards the goal of improving agricultural statistics, the World Bank, through funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), is supporting seven countries in Sub-Saharan Africa in strengthening the production of household-level data on agriculture.

The GHS survey is a cross-sectional survey of 22,000 households carried out annually throughout the country. Under the work of the partnership, a full revision of the questionnaire was undertaken and, at the same time, a sub-sample of the GHS now forms a panel survey. The panel component (GHS-Panel) applies to 5,000 households of the GHS collecting additional data on multiple agricultural activities and household consumption. As the focus of this panel component is to improve data from the agriculture sector and link this to other facets of household behavior and characteristics the GHS-Panel drew heavily on the Harmonized National Living Standards Survey (HNLSS-a multi-topic household survey) and the National Agricultural Sample Survey (NASS-the key agricultural survey) to create a new survey instrument to shed light on the role of agriculture in households' economic wellbeing that can be monitored over time. The first wave of the revised GHS and GHS-Panel was carried out in two visits to the Panel households (post-planting visit in August-October 2010 and post-harvest visit in February-April 2011) and one visit to the full cross-section (in parallel with the post-harvest visit to the panel). The GHS-Panel will be carried out every two years while the GHS-Cross Section is usually carried out annually. A schematic of data collection is shown in Figure 1. Note that a separate document details the contents of the GHS (cross section). This document provides details on the GHS-Panel only.

Expected Benefits

The specific outputs and outcomes of the revised GHS with panel component project are:

Development of an innovative model for collecting agricultural data in conjunction with household data;
Development of a model of inter-institutional collaboration between NBS and the FMA&RD and NFRA, inter alia, to ensure the relevance and use of the new GHS;
Strengthening the capacity to generate a sustainable system for producing accurate and timely information on agricultural households in Nigeria.
Comprehensive analysis of poverty indictors and socio-economic characteristics

Innovations

The revised GHS with panel component contains several innovative features.

1. Integration of agricultural data at the plot level with household welfare data;
2. Creation of a panel data set that can be used to study poverty dynamics, the role of agriculture in development and the changes over time in health, education and other labor activities, inter alia.
3. Use of small area estimation techniques (SAE) to generate state level poverty data by taking advantage of the integration of the panel households into the GHS cross-section.
4. Collection of information on the network of buyers and sellers of goods with which household interact
5. Use of GPS units for measuring agricultural land areas;
6. Involvement of multiple actors in government, academia and the donor community in the development of the survey and its contents as well as its implementation and analysis;
7. Use of concurrent data entry in Wave 1. In later Waves the project will develop and implement a Computer Assisted Personal Interview (CAPI) application for the paperless collection of the GHS-Panel;
8. Use of direct respondents for all sections of the questionnaires where individual level data or specific economic activity data are collected;
9. Creation of publicly available micro data sets for researchers and policy makers;
10. Active dissemination of agriculture statistics.

Coverage and Scope

The revised GHS with the panel component, while having an intensive focus on agriculture, is a national survey. The survey covered all the 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Abuja. Both urban and rural enumeration areas (EAs) were canvassed.

The survey covered a wide range of socio-economic topics which were collected via three different questionnaires administered to the household and the community. These are the Household Questionnaire, the Agricultural Questionnaire and the Community Questionnaire.

The survey consisted of three questionnaires for each of the visits; The Household Questionnaire was administered to all households in the sample. The Agriculture Questionnaire was administered to all households engaged in agriculture activities such as crop farming, livestock rearing and other agricultural and related activities. The Community Questionnaire was administered to the community to collect information on the socio-economic indicators of the enumeration areas where the sample households reside.

GHS-Panel Agriculture Questionnaire: The agriculture questionnaire solicits information on land ownership and use; farm labor; inputs use; GPS land area measurement and coordinates of household plots; agriculture capital; irrigation; crop harvest and utilization; animal holdings and costs; and household fishing activities. Some information is collected at the crop level to allow for detailed analysis for individual crops.

GHS-Panel Household Questionnaire: The household questionnaire provides information on demographics; education; health (including anthropometric measurement for children and child immunization); labor and time use; food and non-food expenditure; household nonfarm income-generating activities; food security and shocks; safety nets; housing conditions; assets; information and communication technology; and other sources of household income. Household location is geo-referenced in order to be able to later link the GHS-Panel data to other available geographic data sets.

GHS-Panel Community Questionnaire: The community questionnaire solicits information on access to infrastructure; community organizations; resource management; changes in the community; key events; community needs, actions and achievements; and local retail price information.