N2+meeting+notes+on+baseline+survey+090211

Skype call with Eva, Josie, Katherine and Alemayehu – 9/2/11 N2 planning, implementation and innovation baseline survey is about to start – hopefully on 21st Feb. Two signed research agreements have been received from Columbo and have been sent to Bahir Dar University and to OARI. The one for Holetta is still pending and Tilahun is following up. He might see the relevant people at the Ambo Conference? Next stage is transferring funds after which field work could start. Eva may join the survey team 23-25 Feb and Katherine/Alemayehu could help with logistics if need be – e.g. early flight to Bahir Dar. Consultant, Dr Abeje is ok to join field teams around 21st. If Gerba is available it might be good to use his skills in local stakeholder liaison to get things going re organizing respondents etc.

Alemayehu and Katherine have been speaking to Jemimah about M&E – bit of uncertainty about whether we will do a household baseline. Difficult given that we don’t know the nature or location of interventions that will emerge from innovation platforms. We do of course have the IFPRI survey and we never budgeted for an additional household baseline survey. The informal agreement with Emily is that we access the hh data in exchange for hydrological data. It would be better not to try and formalize this with IFPRI since it could then fall apart. Alemayehu has made a few changes to the checklists based on conversations with Jemimah. If we want to do Social Network Analysis then we could use a student to avoid expanding the current exercise further.