Some SINSO officers after completing the two-day Pilot Test on Thursday.
The Solomon Islands National Statistics Office, SINSO, has successfully carried out a two-day Pilot Test for the Household Income and Expenditure Survey, HIES 2024-2025 in North West Guadalcanal.
On Wednesday 7th and Thursday 8th August 2024, more than half of the SINSO staff were deployed to certain households in Kakabona and Hammock armed with tablets to conduct interviews from the HIES Questionnaires.
They were divided into two groups one for Hammock Beach and the other for Kakabona.
The interviews allowed staff to see how people responded to the survey design and whether the questions will generate useful results.
The field trip comes after a Training of Trainers program with World Bank Survey Specialist Josephine Durazo and Project Manager Gbemisola Oseni.
Starting Monday 29th August, Ms Durazo and Ms Oseni went through the survey questionnaires with the staff, answering questions and making adjustments along the way until it was deemed ready for the field trip.
The Pilot test is just one phase of SINSO’s preparation for the HIES Project. From the Pilot test, the staff have firsthand experience and will provide feedbacks on what supervisors and enumerators will go through during the exercise when the actual survey convenes in late September.
SINSO Officers conducting their interview.
In the next phase, almost a hundred Supervisors and Enumerators who were recruited for the survey will undergo their own training to be conducted and facilitated by the SINSO staff.
SINSO is also initiating the Computer-Assisted Personal Interviewing, CAPI in the HIES project.
The World Bank together with the International Development Association, IDA, is funding the survey with USD 3 million dollars (SBD 25 million dollars).