End-to-End Support for Grenada’s Household Budget Survey

For Grenada’s Household Budget Survey, rowsquared was embedded alongside the Central Statistical Office from day one — not to run the survey for them, but to build capacity and fill technical gaps throughout.

Implemented under the OECS Data for Decision Making programme in partnership with the World Bank, the survey covered living conditions and household expenditure. Our involvement spanned the full lifecycle: questionnaire design, sampling, GIS-based map generation, CAPI implementation in Survey Solutions, enumerator training, and fieldwork management.

A substantial part of the work centred on the consumption module. We developed a detailed food item and unit mapping system that captured quantities in local terms and converted them to standard units in the back-end — a demanding step essential for producing reliable poverty and expenditure estimates.

For occupation and industry coding, we integrated classiflow, rowsquared’s open-source AI-assisted classification tool, into the fieldwork pipeline. Responses were automatically classified against ISCO and ISIC codes in real time, with low-confidence entries flagged for human review. All of this fed into rowsquared’s Survey Control Hub — a purpose-built data quality interface where data monitors managed their own review queues, inspected flagged interviews, and resolved cases in a structured workflow. This turned what is often a fragmented, reactive process into a systematic, high-frequency quality pipeline.

We supported the CSO’s IT team in setting up the survey server and established a structured knowledge management repository. rowsquared also conducted a full review of the census frame, consolidating enumeration district shapefiles into a coherent GIS dataset and setting up a new frame management system. A sampling methodology note, fieldwork implementation manual, and structured review notes give the CSO a clear, reproducible account of how the survey was delivered — and a practical foundation for future rounds.

The survey ran well, and the CSO team owned it. rowsquared’s role was to extend their capacity, fill technical gaps, and ensure nothing fell through the cracks.