MASO begins recruitment of third cohort of youth participants

The MASO programme has started a recruitment process of the third cohort of youth participants. A data collection exercise has begun across five major cocoa growing regions including the Volta, Western, Brong -Ahafo, Ashanti and Central Regions.

The MASO programme provides employment opportunities for youth in cocoa growing communities to develop various career options in the cocoa sector either as cocoa farmers or as entrepreneurs within the cocoa value chain. The programme has to date recruited over 4,700 young people from more than 200 communities.

The data collection exercise seeks to identify potential recruits to participate in the programme for 2018. Young men and women aged 17-25 years who are out of school are the target group who will be interviewed to ascertain their eligibility. The data collected will also be used in measuring programme result.

According to the Programme Monitoring Evaluation and Learning Coordinator for Solidaridad West Africa, Nathaniel Amoh Boateng, the exercise is divided into two sessions. The first is to conduct a screening exercise from which eligible youth will be selected, after which baseline data will be collected from the selected new recruits.

MASO’s baseline data collection exercise have been structured with the future in mind. 12 months after graduation of the youth from MASO, an evaluation data will be collected from a sampled of the MASO youth and compared to the baseline information, to see the extent of influence MASO has had in the lives of the participating youth.

Meanwhile, an intensive 3-day training programme was organised for the 40 enumerators engaged to support in the enumeration exercise. The training was to ensure the enumerators understood the various questions to be asked during the data collection.

A day’s pretesting exercise was also undertaken in New Edubiase and Subriso to test, screen and understand how the questionnaire will pan out in the field. The training exercise also ensured enumerators have good community entry skills and are equipped to answer questions that arise on MASO during the field work.

An Open Data Kit (ODK) based mobile application is being used for the data collection exercise to ensure real-time data collection. The enumerators go into the communities with the questionnaire on tablets. Data is collected on the background of the youth, employment activities (agricultural and non- agricultural), business operations, savings/loan culture and general life skills. The baseline data ends on 15th February.

The more than 20 days’ exercise is to reach over 3,600 youth over a period across the 10 ‘MASO districts’