CASE 01 / KOLO
Beiersdorf and AAK Ghana
Kolo Nafaso shea programme, northern Ghana
Independent baseline and multi-year verification
A five-year programme supports women in the shea value chain through savings groups, financial resilience training, improved cookstoves, tree planting and parkland management. The funder and the implementer both needed an independent account of what is actually happening in the communities, measured the same way each round.
Method
- 01Early-stage qualitative baseline, February 2026
Focus group discussions with 91 women across seven communities. Some activities had already started, so the report is written as an early-stage account rather than a strict pre-intervention baseline, and says so in the methodology.
- 02A participant frame built from source records
Rather than working from a supplied list, the frame was assembled from the implementer's own training records so that participations and people could be told apart. A stratified sample of 198 women has been drawn, with 99 reserves held in advance against non-contact.
- 03Observation alongside interviews
The design observes cookstoves in the home, counts tree survival on the woman's own land, opens savings group ledgers with the group, and checks water points, rather than relying on recall alone.
- 04Built to be repeated
Verification is designed to run at baseline and again at later points in the programme, so the frame and the instruments are reusable rather than rebuilt each round.
Outputs
- Qualitative baseline report
- Verification framework
- Sampling note and drawn sample with reserves
- Field instruments and enumerator training materials
- Cleaned verification dataset
- Year 1 verification report
Value to the client
The programme has an independent, repeatable measurement line it can report against, and a documented participant frame that makes later rounds comparable.