Research & Assessment
Baseline Surveys
A baseline is the number you will be judged against in year three. If it is collected casually — wrong season, convenience sample, leading questions — every later claim of impact inherits the flaw. We treat the baseline as the most consequential fieldwork a programme will ever commission.
How we work
Indicators first. Questionnaire second. Field third.
We start from the programme's results framework: which indicators will be reported, to whom, at what precision. Only then do we design instruments and sampling. In the field that means trained local enumerators working in Kashmiri, Urdu or Hindi as the household requires, supervised daily, with digital data collection and back-checks on a fixed share of interviews.
- Indicator definition and measurement protocol agreed with the funder before fieldwork
- Sampling design: frames, stratification, cluster selection and sample-size calculations that match the reporting precision claimed
- Instrument development and translation, with field piloting and revision — not straight-to-print questionnaires
- Enumerator recruitment and training, including informed-consent and child-protection protocols
- Digital data collection with GPS-tagged submissions, daily supervision and independent back-checks
- Cleaning, weighting and a baseline report that states values, confidence intervals and every limitation honestly
- A documented, reusable dataset so the endline is comparable by design
Launching a programme without a defensible baseline?
Tell us the indicators and the geography. We will tell you what a credible baseline takes — and what it costs to skip one.
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