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This is an archived USAID document retained on this web site as a matter of public record.
Polls Help USAID Understand and Respond
FrontLines: April 2008
A recent public opinion poll in Afghanistan, which identified “swing” groups likely to be moved by foreign assistance, is the latest in a series of polls helping USAID target its programs
for maximum impact.
The Afghan poll follows many other polls, surveys, and focus groups funded by USAID in Indonesia, Poland, Pakistan, Ukraine, Georgia, the West Bank and Gaza, Egypt, and other countries.
“The struggle is for Afghan hearts and minds,” said Craig Charney, founder of Charney Research, which carried out the Afghanistan poll in November. “We apply campaign techniques to figure out ‘whose hearts?’ and ‘what is on their minds.’”
Some major goals of polls,
said Carrie Gruenloh of the Democracy and Governance Office, are to: verify that elections
are fair, help governments
respond to the needs of their people, monitor tensions,
and measure how people see their leaders.
For example, surveys in Africa have asked people how often they must pay bribes each month. A poll in Afghanistan asked if the government should allow peaceful opposition.
Charney’s Afghan poll queried
Afghans in all 34 provinces and found declining support for U.S. and NATO forces in some areas since last year and a slight increase in support for the Taliban. But it also indicated places where swing groups could be affected by schools and other USAID projects.
A previous poll discovered that, since most Afghans live in isolated villages, they had no knowledge of the extensive foreign
aid programs building schools, roads, and clinics. This undermined their confidence in the government. The poll also found that most Afghans got news only through radio or personal
contacts.
In Indonesia, polls were used in 1998 to determine civic and voter education needs and to identify key topics that people wanted to discuss in advance of elections after the downfall of the 20-year Suharto dictatorship, said Karma Lively of the Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI). Focus groups and polls asked how people viewed the media and then created public service announcements (PSAs) designed to calm fears and promote
cooperation in forming a new government.
“We learned what groups had impact, such as a popular Indonesian band,” said Lively. “So we integrated them in a PSA. Some of the TV ads made little sense to us but resonated with Indonesians because they were designed by local public relations firms” in touch with local tastes. Lively also noted that the capacity to conduct effective polling varies from country to country and can be particularly challenging in societies
devastated by war.
Polls are especially valuable in countries such as Liberia, where USAID re-entered after years of war, to find out what people are thinking and what they need. OTI often starts by studying all the polls carried
out by others.
And polls can help aid workers
identify the services that people want the most and thus target foreign assistance to have the biggest impact. This kind of polling is an extension of the basic assessments carried out by aid workers after disasters or other crises.
In Afghanistan, for example, OTI carried out a survey using
face-to-face interviews soon after the Taliban was ousted and millions
of Afghan refugees began returning home.
“In late 2001 to early 2002, our implementing partner asked about 800 people in several of the largest cities in Afghanistan a dozen questions and one of the top priorities they identified was education, including rebuilding schools destroyed by the Taliban,” said Lively. “As a result, we started working with the new government and communities
in identifying and rehabilitating
dozens of schools. The USAID mission in Kabul later built or rehabilitated more than 600 schools.”
In the West Bank and Gaza, USAID carried out polls that asked the Palestinians if they knew that U.S. assistance was providing water, sanitation, roads, and other services. When the polls showed that few people were aware that USAID was a major donor, then a series of locally crafted TV ads and billboards
informed the public about the extent of U.S. assistance.
Polls then showed that public awareness of U.S. aid had risen sharply.
The November poll that Charney carried out for ABC News—he shared the results with Agency communications experts in March—told where the swing groups are—along the Pakistan frontier and around Kabul. Charney said that if aid was focused in these areas, the swing groups would be moved to support the Karzai government.
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