Ghana - Afrint Village Level Data 2002 and 2008, Round I & II

Data collection for the first round of the Afrint project was made in 2002. The data collected as part of the second round are referred to as 2008 data, although in some cases collected in late 2007. From the outset the research team selected five case study countries: Ghana, Kenya,Malawi, Nigeria and Tanzania. Outside francophone Africa, these five countries were ideally suited, in the researchers view, to charting progress in intensification, induced from below by farmers themselves, or state induced, as in the Asian Green Revolution. At the insistence of Sida, to the original five countries, four more were added: Ethiopia, Mozambique, Uganda and Zambia. Unlioriginal five, the three last mentioned countries were deemed less constrained with respect to productive resources in agriculture. Ethiopia on the other hand is peculiar in an African context, with its long history of plough agriculture, and feudal-like social formation. In this project, the heterogeneous sample of countries has proved less cumbersome to work with than one might have expected.

Formally, the Afrint sample was drawn in four stages, of which the country selection described above was the first one. The next stage was regions within countries, followed by selection of villages within regions, and with selection of farm households as the last stage. All stages except the final one have been based on purposive sampling. Data collection was sought to be made at all four levels.

The households sampled within these countries were selected with respect to the agricultural potential of the areas in which they reside. The intention was to capture the dynamism in the areas that are 'above average' in terms of ecological and market (infrastructure) endowments but excluding the most extreme cases in this regard.
For logistical reasons we could not aim for a sample which is representative in a statistical sense. Instead we aimed at a sample which is illustrative of conditions in the maize-cassava belt, excluding both lowpotential dry and remote areas and extreme outliers at the other end of the scale, i.e. privileged high-potential areas.

Thus we used a four-stage sample design, with purposive sampling at all stages, except the last one, where households were sampled after having made up household lists. When we compare point estimates from the sample with those from other sources, for examples yields for the various crops with FAO statistics, no apparent sample bias has been detected. In addition to household questionnaires we also used village questionnaires. Respondents to village interviews were key persons, like village leaders and extension agents. Investigators were also instructed to conduct focus group interviews with representatives for various segments of the village population, including women farmers.

When going for a second round and a panel in 2008, we went for a balanced panel design, i.e. constructing the 2008 sample so that in itself it would be representative of village populations in 2008. This also involved sampling descendants when a household had been partitioned since 2002. In case of sizeable in-migration to a village, we also provided for sampling from the newly arrived households. The 2002-2008 panel thus is a subset of the two cross sectional samples. In itself this subset is not statistically representative of the village population in any of the two years.


20.6 percent


79.4 percent


The weight for the data was not provided.