Finding Out Faster: Pre-Survey Scoping for a Study of Deprivation in Majakaneng, North West Province, South Africa

We discuss scoping research carried out over a short period of time in Majakaneng in Bojanala District in the platinum belt in South Africa. The research aims to gather and analyse evidence on the effects of investments in high-value agricultural exports, in this specific case the production of blueberries, on the well-being of poor women. High-value agricultural exports have been identified as offering a particularly promising path to structural transformation, yet there remain fears that capital-intensive agricultural export businesses in low- and middle-income countries may have very few ‘inclusive’ development benefits. We argue that exploratory scoping research, or ‘finding out fast’, can make a major contribution to the effective design of research projects through, for example, improving sampling strategies and refining the selection of relevant consumer goods for survey questionnaires. We show how the scoping exercise could strengthen the larger research project if, for example in the selection and training of enumerators, closer attention can be paid to overcoming the difficulty of translating the informal terms used by different respondents to refer to similar but not identical consumer durables.