Posted By Tima Suale at 17:09, 13 September 2010

Tima Suale is an Age Demands Action activist working for HelpAge Mozambique.

Here, she explains how she took part in our survey about people's perspectives on ageing in the country:

"We did the ADA survey in Mozambique in nine communities from three provinces: Tete, Maputo and Gaza. 

Collecting survey results

Before starting with the field work, we made some steps to reach our goals:

• The first thing to do was to translate the questionnaire into Portuguese to make it easy and accessible to all field interviewers;
• Then, we organised a one day session training for the field interviewers to familiarise them with the questionnaire and to create a common interpretation of the questions;
• Since many of our group don’t speak Portuguese, we did the training in the local language to ensure that translations to local languages were made correctly.

The field work team was composed of eight people including local interviewers and HelpAge staff. All team members played a specific role and we were divided in distinct groups:

• Six of them were doing the questionnaire directly with participants;
• One person was taking photos of the participants and another person registered their names.

Doing the survey was a great experience

We thought of this survey as a good opportunity to collect information and points of view from community members therefore we inserted some questions related to rights and health into the original questionnaire.

The survey was a great and intensive experience; many of the interviewed people were older persons and the majority of them women. In average we reached 40 people in each community.

See which countries have taken part so far and join in with the survey yourself here! 

Tags for this post ada africa, africa, age demands action, Africa, Millennium Development Goals