Signing up to do a student survey during our project is an extreme challenge if not a regrettable mistake. It has proved very difficult to get anybody in Uganda to respond to our survey, or for that matter to get any professors to actually send out the survey to the students. They all claim that students are gone for the summer, which I feel shouldn't be a barrier to getting the word out about the survey since everyone has email addresses.
Tuesday / Wednesday
Aside from other meetings today, we did have an adventurous time trying to get some surveys from students that were doing summer training at the Makerere Research Institute, which is basically a place for students to get hands on agriculture experience at a farm owned by the university. The students were residing at the institute so Vishal and I traveled there to manually administer the survey to the students that we could find. With the help of the custodian, we were able to make about 20 students sit down and take the survey for us. It was long and arduous, but at least we have some data now. A little later, we were able to get in touch with a helpful professor who facilitated us in getting a few more surveys done.
She promised to bring us these surveys before the end of our trip, but that didn't really get done without a large hassle. Noone was able to bring us the data before the end of our trip on Wednesday so we had to pay a driver to go get them for us. We were pleasantly surprised to get more data than we expected and processing it took the two of us more than 3 hours.
My advice for surveys is to avoid them when you are on a short term project where you need to deliver much more value than just the data. Hopefully, we can do both on this trip, a task that definitely exceeds expectations.
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