SWB Project Spotlight: Ground Truth Solutions
Sloka Iyengar, PhD, past Director of Marketing and Communications at SWB (and current Secretary) talked to Christian Els of Ground Truth Solutions. This interview was conducted in February 2023.
Sloka: Hello, Christian! It is so nice to be here with you. We would love to hear about the work your organization did with SWB. To start us off, could you share a little bit about yourself, the work that you have been doing, and how you got into your current organization?
Christian: I have a background in natural sciences, and I worked in the humanitarian sector just before joining Ground Truth Solutions (GTS). For a couple of years as a consultant, I worked on projects that had a strong quantitative component often involving financial data and other data sets. I joined GTS in 2019 and have been working here ever since.
Sloka: What is GTS and what does the organization do?
Christian: GTS is trying to push the humanitarian system to be more responsive to the people who receive assistance, the end users. There are often decisions being made at the headquarters and not necessarily in the countries where people are being served. We do our work in various ways, one of which is collecting quantitative data perception data from these people. My unit oversees analyzing this data. Data quality is a big part of our work, as is sampling. The sampling question has been challenging and continues to be challenging. We reached out to SWB to get support on that front. GTS is not a delivering agency; we collect and analyze data and use that perception data to influence the system. We are not handing out aid ourselves to people directly.
Sloka: How did you find SWB and what specific project did SWB and GTS work on?
Christian: Initially, SWB was introduced to me by our former CEO who was also the founder of GTS; at that point, he was on the board of the H2H network. Since SWB is also part of the network, that was the initial introduction. We have worked on another project with SWB before, and it made us decide to reach out to you again. The specific aim was to get a better handle on some of the challenges when it comes to sampling in the countries where we work. In these countries, it is not always easy to do phone surveys and online surveys as we may do in the US and Europe. People receiving humanitarian aid are often very mobile in terms of being displaced moving from one location to the other, and there is little demographic data on these people. We were interested in interviewing them which entailed creating a sample frame and robust sampling. The idea was to get some SWB volunteers who have expertise in sampling, and basically to discuss all the sample designs we did. We wanted to introduce the design to them, as well as our ideas on the limitations in terms of what data we have access to. Our main goal was to get an idea of the things we could improve. This work required a bit of technical expertise. I found SWB volunteers to be very experienced and senior statisticians that we had access to. Some based in California got up up at 5 in the morning! Overall, it was a very helpful project, and great for us to talk through these methodologies and designs.
Sloka: What is the future of the project that SWB did with GTS; how will this project help GTS in the long run?
Christian: We were able to implement a couple of things that we will continue to use in the future. There were a few technical things we implemented using software and software packages to calculate weights associated with the particular sample design. There is a methodology document draft template that we will continue to use in our report, that will be adjusted accordingly, but that was initially reviewed and suggested by SWB volunteers. In addition to all the learning, we generated also documents and software packages that SWB volunteers helped us navigate through that, and how to use it. We are very grateful. For a nonprofit organization like us, paying someone would be just impossible in terms of um hourly and daily rates of people with those skills.
Sloka: Is there anything else that stands out to you as far as working with SWB?
Christian: With all this great expertise, there are challenges as well. There may be points where some volunteers see things slightly differently than other volunteers; this is the nature of the work. Working with SWB required us to do a lot of preparation because we couldn’t just hand over documents, as there is a lot of context about the data that needs to be provided. So, there was quite a lot of work required from our end in the sense that we had to prepare and maybe we didn’t always have enough time to prepare for the conversations in detail. I think in the long run, the learning was so much greater for us, but I would say we had to also invest lot, which is fine. There is an element there that by investing the time, we got a great return for sure. SWB is an amazing organization and the work that is being done there is great. We benefitted so much! Thank you!