Four years ago I wrote about our first experiences of attempting a longitudinal panel survey in fragile and conflict-affected situations. No-one, as far as we knew, had done it before, at this scale, with this many countries. Some people working in similar fields thought we were crazy but we took a deep breath and went ahead. Four years later, we’re publishing the results of a two-wave panel survey covering the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Uganda.
So: were we crazy?
Not entirely. Firstly, by building a baseline for the panel in six countries and then progressing to a second wave in five countries (we couldn’t return to South Sudan due to a major escalation of violent, armed conflict) we’ve shown research like this is possible.
And we didn’t just go back to the same places. In places often presumed to be ‘no-go’ locations for research we found six out of seven people we originally interviewed.
We certainly had our fair share of good fortune and frustrating setbacks. Our teams navigated all sorts of obstacles: phones tapped by the secret service; theft of wages and equipment; curfews, blockades and protests. They tracked people across significant distances, waded through rivers in deep ravines, and – literally – climbed mountains. For us, the experience suggests a recalibration is in order. We can and should change our expectations about what data collection is possible in fragile and conflict-affected situations.
Secondly, as our analysis has demonstrated, this panel data generates findings that could not otherwise have been found with a regular cross-sectional approach (where we survey in the same places but with a new sample of people each time). Our research on food security makes this clear. Although across all five countries there was little change in average food security between the two waves of interviews, tracking the food security of each individual over time demonstrated a far more complicated set of trajectories than is often assumed in donors policies and programmes.
