Embedded Files
Page 7
The characteristics of the other key stakeholders, MoFA staff, are shown in Table 3. TAs and technical officers (TOs) are less-skilled technicians who work directly with smallholder farmers. The other staff members play supervisory or advisory roles. To obtain an overview of the study area, a quantitative survey was conducted in January 2012 to characterize the farming systems. Focus group discussions were held in the first half of 2012 in each of the four communities about their experience of veterinary services delivery before and after decentralization and privatization. In the second half of 2012, in-depth interviews in the local language (through an interpreter) were conducted with five elderly farmers per community on their personal experiences of the reforms. In both the focus group discussions and the in-depth interviews, farmers compared the period before and after the reforms. The topics discussed included who the veterinary TOs were, types of veterinary services accessed by farmers, requests made to the TOs and responses received, charges, vaccination regimes, and mortality rates. In-depth interviews were also conducted with traders, Fulani herdsmen, and licensed and unlicensed veterinary drugstore operators identified through snowball sampling on their viewpoints on changes in the veterinary services they employ and/or deliver. MoFA staff from national headquarters, regional, and district level were interviewed about their experiences of the changes before and after the reforms. Documents about MoFA’s decentralization and privatization (Humado 2003, Amezah 2007) were reviewed. Direct observations were also used to collect data. For example, we spent about 10 hours observing customers purchasing veterinary drugs from four licensed stores and two hours at one unlicensed store watching customers. We interviewed 10 livestock traders and tracked eight of them from Babile Market (the biggest livestock market in Lawra District) to the two main southern Ghana markets (Kumasi and Accra). For an overview of the research methods and numbers of actors inter-viewed. Qualitative data (from field notes and transcripts) were analysed using Atlas.ti version 5. The data were coded using the questions: ‘What is the actor doing or saying in this data segment?’ ‘What salient factors affect the actor’s actions and what are the consequences?’ Guided by these analytical questions, concepts were identified and short notes or memos written for each concept. Patterns in terms of recurrent and concurrent concepts were identified, and narrative summaries were composed from the memos (Neuman 2000). The quantitative survey data were summarized using descriptive statistics.
Google Sites
Report abuse