By: Gracie Rosenbach and David J Spielman
How important is farming to rural households in Rwanda? What do household livelihood strategies tell us about nutritional outcomes? How does poverty relate to family size, education, or landholdings? These are just a few of the many policy questions that can be informed with good data and solid statistical analysis.
But good data and a sharp analytical mind are only as good as the tools we have at our disposal. This was the motivation behind a recent virtual learning event conducted on the application of Stata – a go-to statistical software package for many analysts and researchers – for policy analysis in Rwanda.
The learning event, organized by the Rwanda Strategy Support Program, leaned heavily on data from Integrated Household Living Conditions Survey (EICV), which is a nationally representative survey collected every few years by the National Institute of Statistics of Rwanda (NISR). This survey provides a wealth of information on households in Rwanda: their educational backgrounds, housing conditions, income and employment, household consumption, agricultural production, and so on.
But for many early-career analysts (and even those later in their careers!), it can be daunting to dive into this large dataset without having a firm knowledge of Stata. Stata is a useful but complex analytical tool that can help researchers with data management, statistical analysis, graphics, simulations, regressions, and much, much more.
IFPRI-Rwanda’s learning event held last week – “An Introduction to Household Data Analysis: Using Stata to Describe, Transform, and Analyze Data” – brought together more than 100 registered participants from public, private, and civil society sectors across Rwanda. Using the EICV5 data from NISR, participants learned how to:
- Describe the data – how can we see what percent of households live in urban areas, and of those households in urban areas, what percent are below the poverty line?
- Transform the data – how can we use the data from NISR to construct new variables of interest, such as whether or not the household is female-headed?
- Analyze the data – how can we estimate and compare household welfare, and how can we analyze what is associated with one household having higher welfare than another?
The learning event opened the door not only to generating tabular results, but also visualizations of these results with bar and line graphs, scatterplots, and so on. One of the figures that participants created together was a bar graph showing the percent of households in each poverty category across the provinces of Rwanda (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Household poverty categories, by province (2016-17)
Source: Integrated Household Living Conditions Survey (EICV5), National Institute of Statistics of Rwanda 2017
This learning event was the first in a series that IFPRI-Rwanda will conduct on how to use Stata for policy analysis. Last week we covered the foundations of Stata, which are crucial to fully master before diving into more complex topics such as advanced regression techniques, impact evaluations, and microsimulations. Capacity development is one of the IFPRI-Rwanda Strategy Support Program pillars, and so we look forward to continuing to engage the policy and research communities in Rwanda through these future events.
Finally, a quick note on why we called this a “learning” event, and not a “training” event. The way we see it, these events are an opportunity for all participants learn together. IFPRI-Rwanda is a learning program – we exchange ideas, generate knowledge, and develop capacity in a collaborative manner. Why? Because there are no easy answers in the world of food policy – just more questions. We try to answer those questions by continuously exchanging ideas with each other, testing our hypotheses, and revising our views of the world to keep Rwanda on its encouraging upward trajectory; and tools like Stata are critical to this learning journey.
About the authors
Gracie Rosenbach is the country program manager of the IFPRI Rwanda Strategy Support Program.
David J Spielman is the program leader of the IFPRI Rwanda Strategy Support Program.
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