Impact Assessment Survey for SAIL in Egypt

IFAD’s Sustainable Agriculture Investments and Livelihoods Project (SAIL) supports smallholder farmers across rural Egypt with irrigation rehabilitation, climate-smart farming practices, and rural financing. As part of its evaluation cycle, IFAD’s Evidence for Development Impact (EDI) office conducted a rigorous impact assessment of the project. rowsquared was brought on board to deliver the survey on a tight timeline.

Working together with local partner El Zanaty, rowsquared supported the EDI team across several key areas. We contributed to the sampling strategy and the establishment of a credible counterfactual, helping to ensure that the evaluation design could produce reliable estimates of the project’s impact.

On the questionnaire side, rowsquared supported IFAD in their effort to design a food consumption module, aimed at capturing per-person calorie intake from both in-house and out-of-house consumption, a methodologically demanding component that required careful structuring to produce meaningful nutritional data.

We conducted a dedicated pre-test to verify the functionality and validity of the full set of instruments in the field. This allowed us to identify and address practical issues before the main data collection, ensuring that the tools worked reliably for both enumerators and respondents.

rowsquared then led a comprehensive interviewer training, with a strong emphasis on quality. Throughout the training, we administered continuous written assessment tests to evaluate each interviewer’s understanding and readiness. Individual feedback was provided to trainees, helping to raise the overall competence of the field team before deployment.

During fieldwork, we deployed our new custom-built data quality assurance hub to track interview completion, flag issues in real time, and monitor data consistency across the operation. This tool gave both our team and IFAD full visibility into fieldwork progress and data quality.

rowsquared delivered a clean, high-quality dataset on time and on schedule, providing EDI with a solid foundation for their impact assessment of SAIL.