| Abstract |
The AHTS covered a final sample of 8,840 households, the largest household-level sample for an agricultural survey in Sierra Leone. However, since comparable agricultural data have not been collected before this, the AHTS results do not allow any comparisons over time.
It should be noted that out of the final sample of 8,840 households, 8,034 households come from the original sample of targeted households, 404 are replacements and 402 are from the re-listed EAs. There were a number of EAs where the Listing exercise was not done correctly. Most of these EAs (except for the 3 described above that were dropped by the Technical Team) were re-listed during the course of the AHTS fieldwork and new samples were drawn.
The AHTS questionnaire was designed to capture the decisions farmers make, the yields and production levels achieved by the average household, as well as the access to services and technology, food security and other dimensions of agricultural households in Sierra Leone. The survey design followed international standards, with adaptations to local context through extensive field testing. The target sample size was chosen following rigorous power calculations based on SSL data available prior to the AHTS.
The AHTS focused on a subset of eight “core crops” comprised of five food crops (rice, cassava, maize, groundnut and sweet potato) and three tree cash crops (cacao, coffee and oil palm). Detailed data on these crops was collected in the eight “crop specific” sections of the AHTS and are provided in this AHTS Report. In addition, some basic data was collected across all crops as well as basic data on household characteristics. In addition, the AHTS collected some data on revenues, access to seeds from the formal sector and other aspects of agriculture that is designed to allow the Government of Sierra Leone to track whether subsistence farmers are becoming more linked to commercial systems over time. |
