As 2019 draws to a close, the RHoMIS team are celebrating a productive and enjoyable year. We have seen RHoMIS grow to a new level of establishment, with clearer systems and communications, and another 10,000 rural households interviewed.

This is a short blog article as we wrap up the year and prepare for some well-earned rest. Our team are on holiday for the rest of December and early January. Please bear with us while we take this time of rest and reflection with family. We will be back from January 6. ​

​2020 promises to start in the same vein as 2019, with new surveys already scheduled for Vietnam, Cambodia, Tanzania, Mozambique and Mali!

Finally, thank you to all of the community of practice who have added to RHoMIS over 2019. It has been a pleasure working with colleagues and associates both new and old. We look forward to continued teamwork and collaboration next year.

​Here at RHoMIS HQ, we are busy preparing the tool for a significant version update. Having been working with version 1.5 for most of 2019, from January 2020 onwards we are upgrading the entire RHoMIS system to version 1.6. Unlike the incremental survey improvements in the past, the current update is wider ranging and a key step towards bringing together the various elements of the toolkit into a coherent whole.

​We have updated the core survey, built a super-short “minimal” core survey, updated all the optional modules, coherently packaged our data processing scripts (for the core content), updated our training materials, and will be updating our website to make all of these easily accessible.  

​Our RHoMIS work has led to a unique harmonised database of quantitative information on smallholder livelihoods in low and middle income countries (now containing interviews of more than 28,000 households in 31 countries). We are now in full force analysing these data to identify pathways towards food security, and underpin strategic studies trying to identify the drivers of diverse diets and possible trade offs between agricultural production intensification and key welfare indicators like gender equity.

What is less known is that our RHoMIS research actually originated from work focusing on bringing together existing household survey data from a wide range of projects and using those data to identify common indicators of food security, and farm livelihood characteristics determining food security. 

​RHoMIS is being utilised in a nutrition study led by the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and the Thai Nguyen University of Agriculture and Forestry (TNUAF). The study aims to compare diet diversity data collected for the immediate past with data collected from the same household over a 12 month recall period. ​

​I’ve worked with the RHoMIS survey for over a year now, built close to thirty applications, and worked with research teams in over twenty countries. Yet my trip to Uganda last week was my inaugural experience with applying the tool in situ. The trip gave me a first-hand experience of some of the challenges and nuances of local application of a survey.