Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Gambung survey results

On our second day at Gambung, the team conducted a survey with a number of villagers to gather information on their monthly expenditure, energy usage, sources of water, and health issues concerning water and pollution. We all split up and tackled a different part of the village, reaching almost 8% of a village of 700 over the course of two hours, and gaining some insight into the lives of the local population; how they live daily, what they need, and what their standard of living is. It was eye-opening, to say the least. There more pictures to follow and you can access them via our pictures link on the left hand column!
The results (shown below graphically) clarify a lot of what we assumed. The majority of answers were quite obvious, and it was interesting to note that more people owned TVs and mobile phones than understood the health risks involved with river pollution! Another interesting result was that the two most important aspects over the next five years were education and electricity. 
This data goes a long way towards our scenarios and recommendations for the biogas/waste management project. 

Feel free to browse through it all, starting with Friddy and one of the participants in our survey!
We're back in the village tomorrow to monitor the installation of the biogas generator. Keep an eye out for our posts. 

Editor's note: We got some feedback on the communication process during the interviews with the villagers and it was something we forgot to mention. We each had a translator - a volunteer from the Rumah Pintar - go along with us to every household. Rizki, our resident Indonesian, translated the survey itself so we were all able to read it out in Indonesian to our respondents! Half of us had the survey on our ipads/iphones so a lot of the people enjoyed inputting their answers on the touch screen directly. Our translator introduced us in the beginning and explained what we were doing, for which everyone seemed quite eager to help and their eyes lit up whenever we said, "hatur nuhun," which means "thank you" in Sundanese, the local dialect!












2 comments:

  1. Really nice data. Was it hard to communicate with the villagers when you split up?

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  2. Hey Scott, thanks for the comment. We just added a note to the post on how we communicated - we all had translators go with us! However the survey was already translated into Indonesian so it was easy for us to read out as well.

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