Farm survey design in the Sahel : Experiences from Burkina Faso

In designing farm household surveys in the Sahel in West Africa much attention should be paid to various specific features of the farming systems. These features relate in particular to the social organisation of the farming communities. Within households, kinship relations have a strong bearing on decision-making with regard to the control and use of land, labour and capital resources. This need to be reflected in the surveys. Surveys have also to deal with specific property relations, with a distinction between collective and individual fields within households, and various common pool resources, including short and long term fallow land at village level. In survey design one also needs to be aware of the simultaneous application of land use techniques with a quite different intensity. The large households and the large number of fields complicate field and yield measurements. Finally surveys should have enough flexibility to incorporate new insights into these complex and elusive farming systems.