Case Study - Philippines Metagora Pilot Project

COMMENTARY

The case study of the Metagora Philippines pilot project is included in the Metagora Training Materials in order to facilitate the reader's understanding of the process by which data are collected for the measurement of democracy, human rights, and good governance, and analysis of those data is subsequently conducted. This case study is presented as an example of a process used and should not be regarded as a model, ideal path, or best practice to follow in all situations. The reader should be aware of the following:

1. The Philippines pilot project focuses on the right to ancestral domains and land of Indigenous Peoples within the Philippines. Using both focus group discussions and a random sample quantitative survey, the project aims to capture the level of awareness and fulfillment of those rights among IPs.

2. The Metagora Philippines pilot project, like all of the projects completed during the Metagora pilot phase, was designed to answer a series of fundamental questions on the feasibility, relevance and usefulness of measuring human rights and democratic governance with statistical methods and tools. As the goal was to test a variety of methodologies within a short time frame, the Metagora pilot projects necessarily had a number of sampling and technical limitations. None of these activities aimed to provide an exhaustive assessment of the human rights and democratic governance issues at stake, though all pilot exercises produced relevant information and had significant policy implications.

3. Due to the constraints described above, it was impossible for the PhilMetagora project to cover all IP communities within the Philippines. The sample design for the survey component of the project was therefore based only on three geographical areas that were chosen to represent a range of educational levels and exposures to outside cultures.

4. Random sampling within those three geographical areas was used. Clusters were randomly sampled and all households within the sampled clusters were interviewed. However, when a sampled household was not present during the field operations, substitution from an adjacent cluster was used. While substitution is an accepted technique in surveys with difficult-to-reach populations, it can introduce immeasurable bias due to the possibility that willing and available respondent households are fundamentally different from those that refuse to respond or are not at home. This issue is further discussed in the Guidelines that are part of these Training Materials.

5. Interviewers were instructed to attempt to interview the head-of-household. If the head-of-household was unavailable, the respondent was anyone in the house who was an IP household member. While use of proxies in this manner is common in random sample surveys, it may introduce unknown bias to the estimates. In order to have a random sample of individual IPs, the respondent must be randomly selected from within the household.

6. The sample unit for the survey was defined as a household; however, the sample frame used was of dwelling units (DUs), or physical housing structures. A dwelling unit might contain more than one household, however. That fact must be considered during the estimation process.

1. The study of indigenous populations is frequently difficult due to physical and cultural barriers. The PhilMetagora survey is an excellent example of how to approach surveys of vulnerable, marginal, and/or isolated populations.

2. The PhilMetagora team was composed of staff from two different national statistical offices, the human rights commission, and the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples. In addition, members of the IP communities, academics, and other civil society members played active roles in advising the core staff. This participatory process is a unique accomplishment of the PhilMetagora project, and can serve as a model for similar future activities.

3. Of all the Metagora activities, the Philippines project was strongest in terms of the use of complementary qualitative and quantitative data-collection techniques. Through the skillful use of focus group discussions, the project team was able to elaborate the quantitative information gathered from the survey, developing a clear picture of the understanding and attainment of rights to ancestral domains and land within the three target IP groups studied.

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