How to do (and how not to do) fieldwork on Fair Trade and rural poverty

Abstract The Fair Trade, Employment and Poverty Reduction (FTEPR) project investigated poverty dynamics in rural Ethiopia and Uganda. When designing fieldwork to capture poor people often missing from standard surveys, several methodological challenges were identified and, in response, four decisions were made. First, FTEPR focused on wage workers rather than farmers and improved on standard questionnaires when collecting labour market information. Second, researchers adopted contrastive venue-based sampling. Third, sampling was based on clearly identifiable "residential units" rather than unreliable official registers of "households". Fourth, an economic definition of "household" was used rather than the more common definition based on residential criteria.