From Sept 2016 to May of 2017, our team designed a household survey to provide longitudinal insight into food and water security experiences and responses over the past three years and in the context of both persistent impacts from the coffee leaf rust outbreak and Central America’s protracted drought. In 2017, the team of survey enumerators returned to the same ~350 households surveyed in 2014 to share results and assess livelihoods, drought impacts, agriculture, and food and water security. Like the earlier survey, the 2017 survey was implemented using the same stratified random sampling approach to capture the role of institutional affiliation in shaping household responses and coping strategies. In developing this year’s survey, the research team drew on the efforts of other teams, existing survey and data sharing repositories, the scientific literature, and the advice and experience of established institutions.
The goals of this project are complementary to a number of other research efforts related to assessing global change, rural livelihoods, land use and household food and water security. To enable comparison between our survey data and data collected in elsewhere (and to benefit from well-piloted survey questions), we drew on a number of openly available survey instruments. These included surveys from CGIAR’s Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security Research Program, Nicaragua’s Census, and the International Forestry Resources and Institutions Methods. Other survey insight came from tools openly shared through Harvard’s Dataverse and the University of Michigan’s ICPSR.