What is RHOMIS?
There is an urgent need for tools that produce standardised, coherent, cost-effective and decision-relevant information to support efficient and impactful development programming. The Rural Household Multi-Indicator Survey
(RHOMIS) framework (www.rhomis.org) does just that, and provides an implementation-ready solution that produces quantitative information for planning and monitoring investments in sustainable intensification across a range of rural contexts.
RHOMIS is a flexible digital platform built on open-source software that can be easily modified to meet a range of needs while collecting a core set of data that feeds into a global discussion on the success of sustainable intensification.
In recent work, supported by the Feed the Future Sustainable Intensification Innovation Lab’s Geospatial and Farming Systems Research Consortium (GFC) and AfricaRISING Ethiopia, both part of the USAID funded Feed the Future portfolio, RHOMIS data has been used to better understand and quantify the trade-offs and synergies inherent to households adopting sustainable intensification using the SIIL-developed Sustainable Intensification Indicator Assessment Framework (https://www.k-state.edu/siil/resources/framework/index.html). The data we collect with RHOMIS is also used to track household and landscape-level progress towards achieving several of the Sustainable Development Goals, in particular SDG 1 (no poverty), 2 (zero hunger) and 5 (gender equity).
Since the time it was first designed and piloted in May 2015 until now, uptake of the tool has been rapid: it has been used by more than 10 different research organisations and a range of development partners in projects financed by USAID, DFID, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and others.
RHOMIS has been applied in 22 different countries and close to 17,000 households have been interviewed. It is used to evaluate and adapt interventions in specific projects; track the different development pathways that improve income, food security and nutritional status of different groups of smallholder farmers; and to identify appropriate technologies that fit the preferences of different groups of farm households.
What does RHOMIS produce?
The survey results, together with the analyses and visualization software, are used to produce a wide range of descriptive and performance indicators: this can range from family size (figure 1), to farm size, crops and livestock species utilized, to well-being indicators like the months in which people experience hunger (figure 2), or other more systematic indicators of food security like HFIAS or Dietary Diversity.
We also capture food consumption and sales of farm produce, information we use to quantify the monetary value of the different activities that households have. We quantify this information for each individual household (figure 3), but also define so-called poverty quantiles: so the 25% of households that score ‘lowest’ in the total value of their activities, up to the ones that score highest, the ‘upper’ class.
The creation of these quantiles allows RHOMIS users to analyse in more detail the behaviour and choices made by households with different levels of wealth (figure 4). We typically see systematic differences between these household groups, with the poorest mostly depending on crop activities (consumption and sales), whereas for the highest quartile the livestock and off farm sources generate the most income (figure 4).
Using this wealth grouping, RHOMIS allows us to investigate how other characteristics differ between wealth groups. An example given here is the gender equity indicator (figure 5), which quantifies the control that women have over the benefits of on and off farm activities (e.g. food and cash).
In this example of surveys conducted in Central Africa we see that for the poorest households the gender equity score is good (women have almost 50% control over income and food), but for wealthier households we see that men have more control over the sales of agricultural produce, resulting in a lower female control score.
Underlying these overall gender equity scores are the female control scores for individual activities and agricultural commodities which we use to identify possible intensification options that do not lead to unbalances in gender equity.
The RHOMIS survey and generated data allow us to examine the relationships between farm household characteristics and welfare in an integral way, quantifying a wide range of welfare indicators, and analyse the benefits of sustainable intensification for different groups of households. With this information, we can better determine the options for sustainable intensification i.e. what works where for which farmer.
Anyone interested in using RHOMIS can check out the website www.rhomis.org and ask for more information on the Contact page.
Written by:
Mark Van Wijk (https://www.ilri.org/users/mwijk)
James Hammond (https://www.ilri.org/users/jhammond)
