As part of the MsCCAFS course, I’m completing my research thesis in conjunction with the CGIAR’s ClimBeR programme. This programme has been developed with the intention of enhancing access to climate information systems for rural smallholders in six countries Guatemala, Kenya, Morocco, Philippines, Senegal, and Zambia. My project is focusing on researching agriculturally based projects that are currently underway in four of these countries: Kenya, Morocco, Senegal, and Zambia. The research carried out on these projects is intended to find out who are the most marginalised groups within these regions, to what extent is social equity integrated into project initiatives, and if there is a consensus on transformational adaptation throughout the projects and how that is being included. Here I am going to discuss the methodology used to carry out this research and what complications inhibited me as the project progressed.
To carry out this research, NVivo coding software was utilised to analyse the proposal-type documents of these projects and to gather information for the three sections of my research project. The marginalisation section of the project was carried out by dividing up vulnerable groups into categories: Gender, Age, Disability, Health, and Unspecified. These groups were decided on through reading two of the proposal documents and gauging which ones featured most predominately. This helped to indicate who were the most marginalised, and even identified marginalisation within the project as some groups may have been mentioned more than others. Like the marginalisation section of the project, to gauge what extent transformational adaptation and social equity were integrated in the researched projects, NVivo coding was used by dividing up vulnerable groups into the same categories (Gender, Age, Disability, Health, and Unspecified). These categories were then analysed on what benefits they availed of as the projects progressed, how these benefits were supported by project initiatives, and how these initiatives were monitored throughout the project’s development. The use of the NVIVO coding software provided the opportunity to adapt the written content within the proposal documents into quantitative data. This data was compiled by analysing the number of times certain marginalised groups were mentioned in the documents. These mentions were divided into sections such as current vulnerabilities experienced by the marginalised groups, economic opportunities provided by the projects and initiatives to support them, and empowerment-related opportunities provided by the projects and the initiatives to support them.
I ran into some complications which inhibited me at certain stages of the project process that mainly revolved around the procurement of the proposal documents. There was a differing degree of difficulty with sourcing project documents depending on the organisations that were funding them. For Instance, groups like the Green Climate Fund, the World Bank, and the International Fund for Agricultural Development were quite easy to find, except for a few exceptions. For other groups, there were very little documents available at all. This was especially true for USAID projects which have quite high beneficiary numbers from their projects but, did not have any documents available, just a small amount of information on their website. Therefore, it was not possible to include their projects in the research analysis. Some projects had initial completion dates that were before the commencement of this project but ended up being held up and still ongoing as this project began. For instance, the Kenya Water Security and Climate Resilience Project had a completion date of the 1st of October 2020, but this has been pushed back to December 2022. An additional financing document is present which applies for further financing of the project to facilitate the two extra years. The Covid-19 pandemic is the main reason behind this happening as projects had to shut down during lockdowns and travel restrictions. The ‘Implementing Empowerment of Marginalised Groups’ and the ‘Monitoring Empowerment of Marginalised Groups’ codes pertain to instances where it was not specified which category of marginalised group was being identified. The need to include a category to account for unspecified marginalised groups became apparent in the Project Appraisal Document for the ‘Kenya National and Rural Inclusive Growth Project’, where all marginalised groups were concentrated together and described as ‘Vulnerable Marginalised Groups’ (VMGs). For some projects, particularly the ones in Senegal, there was a language barrier as some of the proposal documents were in French. For instance, for the IFAD project Support to Agricultural Development and Rural Entrepreneurship Programme Phase II, there was a president’s report that was in English, but the proposal document was solely in French, which made it difficult to do a comparative analysis with the other projects.