First, five districts, broadly representative of the country as a whole, were selected. These districts were Moshi, Kwimba, Lushoto, Makete, and Nzega. Within these study districts, TASAF officials were asked to provide 20 villages in which Vulnerable Groups (VG) applications had moved through the submission process to the point at which they were ready to be funded, but had not yet received any money. Thus while the districts that form the study are in some general sense representative, the sample of villages was selected based on the following criterion: being at a specific stage in the VG application process. Within the 100 study villages, researchers interviewed every household using a short listing survey, providing a census of 61,611 households.
Each household was then sorted into one of the following strata:
- Village elites (Village Executive Office and the village chairman),
- Ineligible households (i.e. households with no vulnerable individuals as defined by TASAF),
- Eligible non-beneficiaries (households with at least one vulnerable individual but not benefitting from any VG sub-projects),
- VG Beneficiaries (households with at least one vulnerable individual and benefitting from a VG sub-project). This group was further stratified into two groups:
- VG group leaders (chairperson, secretary, and treasurer, who hold signatory power over group accounts),
- VG "rank and file" members (the rest of the group conducting the proposed income generating activity - with no signatory powers over the group accounts).
Within each village, a short listing survey was given to every household. A long listing survey was given to all village elites, all households with vulnerable members (including VG beneficiaries and eligible non-beneficiaries - 38,871 households in total), and to a randomly selected sample of ineligible households.
In each of the 100 villages, a household survey was conducted with the two village elites, the three group leaders from each TASAF II group, three randomly sampled "rank and file" members from each TASAF II group, three randomly sampled households from all "eligible non-beneficiaries" in each village, and three randomly selected households from all "ineligible" households in each village. Hence, in a typical village with one TASAF II group funded to run an income generating activity, the sample size was 14. There were 1,544 households that completed the household survey in the 100 villages.
