Dr. Beatrice Rogers is a professor at the Tufts University Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy and Program Director of the Food Policy & Applied Nutrition program. In her 30 years at Tufts, she has done a range of environmental, economic and food policy research and co-founded WSSS. Her most recent work - funded by USAID - has taken her to Honduras, Bolivia, and India (with a colleague doing a companion study in Kenya) to study the persistence of the impacts of food aid programs after they have shut down. She spoke with TIE Communications Coordinator Libby Mahaffy (G'11) in October 2011 about successes in her current projects, lessons learned in the field, and why master's students should conduct field research. An excerpt of their conversation is below.   

Libby Mahaffy: How did you choose Honduras, Bolivia, India, and Kenya as sites for your research on food aid programs that had shut down?

Bea Rogers: We wanted to find programs that shut down that represented Asia, Latin America and Africa. In 2007 USAID changed its policies as to which countries were eligible to get Title II food aid, decreasing the number of eligible countries from 27 or 30 to 17. This gave us the opportunity for us to come in and study them.

To participate, the countries had to hear about the study and volunteer; the Mission Directors had to be willing to participate. We really wanted to do Honduras and Bolivia because both had formal exit strategies. They had workshops and developed matrices of benchmarks for judging progress toward sustainability. At first we were only going to do Bolivia, Kenya and Honduras. But an advocate for India got the Indian USAID Mission to buy in, so we were able to implement the study in that fourth country. We're still in the middle of our work in India, but finishing up in Bolivia, Honduras, and Kenya.

We picked a range of communities in the selected countries and did repeated qualitative surveys, and then implemented a statistically representative quantitative evaluation. It not only allowed us to say how people perceived the process of exit, but also gave us the impact indicators that augmented the qualitative research. The devil is in the details, but it has turned out to be a really great study. This is the first time I've been involved in qualitative work where the qualitative methods were part of the data not just survey question development. I am such a convert! I'm overwhelmed by how useful the qualitative data are.

What successes have you seen from studying these countries?

One of the things we've seen in Bolivia and Honduras is in the agriculture sector, Honduras focused on getting farmers to diversify their production and use improved techniques like contour plowing, low till, and organic fertilizer. So did Bolivia. The suggestion in Honduras not to burn fields has been a big success [because it] doesn't cost anything. The big difference between Honduras and Bolivia is that Bolivia, after the midterm evaluation, added a very strong focus on marketing and commercialization. In Honduras the commercialization hasn't been as much of a focus. We now have this very nice contrast. Bolivian farmers are now using improved techniques and making more money, and more money buys more fertilizer, better feed for their cattle, or improved seeds. One of our strongest lessons is that if you want these activities to be sustainable, people need to know the technological [aspects]: "How do I grow bigger better peaches?" The answer is pruning the trees; but they also need to know [the management side]. How do they know how much to charge? How do they know whether a costly intervention is worth doing? If you don't have that management training, you don't know, as in the case of Honduras: you ask how they decided to charge the price that they're charging for something, and they say, "well it seems like people are willing to pay it," without thinking about whether it covers their costs. That management component was critical.

You are a strong proponent of field research for graduate students, even those in terminal master's degree programs. Why is field research important?

I love doing field research. Fieldwork is where the juice is! That's where you really feel connected to the things that got you involved in the first place.

If you are in a terminal master's program, almost by definition you're not going to be an academic, but that doesn't mean you're not going to do research. The probability for a master's student is that you're going to be doing hands-on, applied, practical stuff....I teach survey research; with surveys, there is almost always a difference between how you want to do it versus how you're going to be able to do it. I want to give you a basis for deciding when you are so far from the ideal that it's not worth doing, and when you are far from the ideal but you're still getting get useful information, and what can you do to come closer to the ideal given the full reality of the situation. There's nothing better for learning than applying your skills.

Another reason why we push anyone who is interested in international work to get that experience is that it gives you a real reality check on whether this is the kind of work that you want to do...Better to know what field you want to work in when you have a chance to branch off in another direction; it's part of the learning experience.

Since you've done so much traveling, is there anywhere that you'd love to go-or go back to-to conduct research in the future?

I was super excited to get back to India. I hadn't been in India since 1979. My very first consulting job after my PhD was a Title II program evaluation in India-talk about coming full circle! Traveling across India was one of the experiences that made me want to continue work in this field. [South Asia] is a part of the world where I would be interested in having the opportunity to go back. I love working in Latin America. Spanish is their first language, and I speak Spanish, so I can be a part of side conversations as well as work conversations in Latin America...There's another project we're doing in Ethiopia. Ethiopia is a wonderful, fascinating country. I've really enjoyed working there, and that has to do partly with the culture. Getting to work there has been really cool; I've really enjoyed the projects, and the colleagues we've been working with there have been great. I've been fortunate to enjoy everywhere. There's no place where I'd say 'no, I don't want to go back there.'