While our results imply that application of diaries may provide opportunities to complement other survey methods, they also point to ways in which training and/or supervision could help improve and thus yield greater consistency between the results from recall-based surveys and diaries, especially regarding the elimination of what appeared like worryingly high levels of discrepancies in reporting of any output from a given crop. For diaries, where no training was provided at all, marginal returns to minimum efforts in this respect to ensure consistency and alert enumerators or monitors of potential pitfalls appear to be particularly high.<sup>18</sup> Given the level of performance achieved even in the absence of any such effort, this could provide scope to add some elements to the diary, e.g. the identity of the person reporting and the plot from which output was obtained, to improve the quality of information and the scope for research. These could include the. Some of these lessons are applied and others tested in an ongoing multi-year survey program by the Uganda Bureau of Statistics in collaboration with the World Bank.

# **5. Conclusion**

This paper started out from the observation that, although a number of factors have made multi-purpose household surveys the workhorse for collection of socio-economic household-level data of many types, the quality of implementation matters and the scope they offer to collect good agricultural information on recurring small events such as the collection of small and seasonally varying amounts of continuously harvested crops often for home consumption, may well be improved. Three results stand out: First, the fact that, even in a country with a long tradition of conducting high quality surveys and a statistical agency that is generally considered to be among the better ones in Africa, data on agricultural output are subject to very large variation suggests that even relatively simple measures (e.g. training, quality audits, consistent coding) to improve data quality could have significant impact on improving the basis of data for decision-making. This points towards the need for a concerted effort to explore the underlying reasons (e.g. reporting of outputs in fresh or dry weight, use of non-standard units), and establish and disseminate standards (as well as monitoring) to improve quality of production surveys. In cases where standard surveys are not the most cost-effective, ways to harness synergies and draw on complementary methodologies will be needed. Our analysis suggests that doing so will require serious analytical effort and reliance on hard empirical data.

Second, in the case of Uganda, a decentralized effort to administer diaries that was supported with a minimal amount of resources and no field testing, training, or other systematic guidance, elicited good participation and decent data quality suggests that there is scope for exploring more actively the potential

> 18 Clear selection criteria (possibly an entry exam), a written manual, better training, and a more incentive-compatible way of remunerating “diary monitors” could probably go a long way and can be done at minimal cost. Supervision, e.g. through spot checks of the information obtained, may require more imagination but could, for example, be accomplished by having regional supervisors who might also have a role in entering and transmitting the data to headquarters on a more frequent basis for further checking.

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