Data gathered from who and where?

In the course of the research I interviewed 174 people within or connected to the food system that feeds Dar es Salaam. Of these 109 are men and 65 are women. The main reason more men were interviewed is due to the dominance of men in some areas of the food system. For example, the transporters and the officials that I had to speak to in government departments and districts are almost all men. When an interview was requested with a government structure or other organisation the person delegated to speak to me was almost always a man. The fact that I am a man may have had an impact, but with many groups it was possible to get a gender balanced set of interviews. Of 20 urban eaters studied 12 were women and 8 men. Of 35 farmers 20 were men and 15 were women. Of 27 traders and dalalis 14 were men and 13 women. The shopkeepers interviewed included 8 men and 8 women. In practice, many actors overlap into different categories and roles so I actually interviewed more eaters, traders and farmers than the numbers above indicate. These numbers are based on having to place an interviewee into a single category to avoid double counting. I share the figures here as minimum numbers and to indicate the spread of people interviewed. For example, a person who runs a duka in Dar es Salaam is obviously also an eater in Dar es Salaam. A number of the wakulima spoken to are also traders and some millers are also farmers, etc. It should be clear by now that I have not followed a classic sampling and questionnaire approach. I carried out qualitative research and do not claim that my sample is statistically valid, but I did cover a cross section of experiences and did so until I reached a level of saturation that makes me confident that I have uncovered most of the important dimensions of the food system feeding Dar es Salaam.

All 174 participants mentioned above were interviewed and many of them were accompanied in their work and in the ‘ride-along’ and engaged with through repeat visits, some over years. Accompaniment of people combined with observation has been invaluable and involved going into fields, spending time at markets, traveling with transporters, and of course eating with people.

Conversations held with many more people than it was possible to interview has provided more information and corroborated what came out of in-depth interviews. By conversation I refer to the informal and often short conversations held, for example, with dozens of different busy traders in markets visited and with farmers and traders over beers in village bars on many evenings. These are not referred to as interviews or counted within the 174 respondents, importantly, however, they turned up new information and avenues for further investigation to be explored later, they also helped to confirm if the information from participants was common to others in the sector or not. For example, in a market place I could quickly confirm, with many traders, information such as the prices and main geographic sources of the crops being sold. This indicated whether the participants interviewed in-depth were representatives of a common experience, in terms of some key information such as geographic source of food, or were outliers. The conversations often also identified new areas to investigate and people to be interviewed.

In some cases, groups have been interviewed, not as especially planned focus or group discussions, but due to circumstances, such as when at a maize mill the owner and workers are sitting together, or at the meat abattoir when it was important to meet the representatives of the government, the traders and the owners together and sometimes when interviewing one trader or farmer there are others around. These situations were taken advantage of to get the wider input and perspective available from the group and they are a source of information from a wider group of participants that I have not been able to quantify. I have only counted, amongst the 174 interviewees, those who were individually interviewed with care taken to do more private individual interviews with them if they were at some point also interviewed in more of a group format. For each individual interviewee, I ensured that I had an opportunity to talk to them with less people around in order to check that they were not influenced by talking in front of the group.

Another form of data gathering was ongoing price checking on key foods, this included checking at the supermarkets, the duka, in the people’s markets and with some of the wholesalers and distributors.

Visits have been made to different key nodes of the food system. This includes going to 16 markets, ten maize milling operations, 16 rice husking machines and six dairy collection centres and distribution points. Not all of these visits involved full interviews that I count within the 174 mentioned above, but they all involved conversations, accompaniment and observation. Some of these were visited a few times, some numerous times, over years.

For Chapter Eight on milk provisioning there was a deliberate decision to look at the Tanga Fresh operation as one of the largest dairy producers in the country, an example of a value chain development and because their products are in many dukas as well as supermarkets in Dar es Salaam. This led me to visiting their operation in Tanga Region. I also drew on extensive field research done by a Master’s Student, Rosanna Martucci, from the University of Amsterdam, who I was co-supervising (Martucci, 2015).