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ASSESSING THE HUMAN DEVELOPMENT STATUS OF THREE KALEDUPA VILLAGES

Introduction

The villages of Ambeua, Buranga and Sombamo all differ very much in wealth, livelihood and standard of living and so all have different problems that the villages wish to address. By investigating problems that the villagers face every day with the method of interviewing I could assess what they felt were priorities. 

Aim

To discover the basic problems facing the villages of Ambeua, Sombano and Buranga from the perspective of the residents and assess what possible solutions can be applied to reduce them.

 

Objectives 

Methodology   

In order to obtain an idea of what the socio-economic structure was in each village, I interviewed the Headman and collected data on population, percentage of the villagers employed in each area of work, percentage of children going to each school and percentage of people migrating from the island of Kaledupa.  

Objective two was addressed by interviewing the local doctor in Ambeua and headmen and head masters in each village. I also conducted interviews with fifteen residents within each village, asking a series of questions under the subheadings of livelihood, health, infrastructure, education, food and problems within the village. By this I wished to discover the most common jobs and what job opportunities there were in the village. I also wished to determine the average earnings of the residents but most importantly the quality of the health facilities, education and public facilities such as wells in each village. By doing this I could form my own opinions of what problems were present as well as what the villagers perceive as a priority for improvement. 

Objective three was achieved by carrying out a survey on thirty different houses within each village looking at the average material wealth. The categories which I perceived as giving me the best idea of measuring the material wealth of each resident were: Roof material, wall material, floor material, type of window and possessions such as whether they own a CD/ radio player, moped, TV, electricity or if they had their own mandi and/ or well. 

Objective four cannot be tackled until the results from the objectives two and three have been analysed. This will be done by looking at passed journals addressing development in areas similar to these villages and analyzing which development strategies would be appropriate to these areas. In particular I wish to concentrate on education infrastructure and health, which in my opinion are priorities for improvement. 

Preliminary results

From what I have gathered so far I can see that the problems in Ambeua are not as serious as those in Sombano and Buranga. The levels of employment are generally higher as is the standard of living. Contrasting to this, Sombano has a very low employment rate and income is generally low. The education facilities are poor and many cannot afford to continue their education to junior school. Similar results were also found in Buranga however these were not as extreme.

The local community to Hoga seem to be more accepting of alcohol and our dress sense.  The people of Pajam said that although they expected westerners to dress as they do in their village they accepted that it was okay for us to wear less on Hoga.  The local community to Hoga have a much better knowledge of the English language than at Pajam.  The local community seem to pray less than 5 times a day, unlike the people at Pajam who swear they still pray 5 times a day.  Both communities wanted to be involved in the decision-making process of tourism development on Kaladupa however the community exposed to tourism had more suggestions on how to develop it.  Another interesting result was that the people of Pajam still regarded soft drinks such as Coke as luxury whereas the majority of the local community now perceive it to be a usual everyday drink. 

Dissemination of results

A final dissertation report entitled An Assessment of the human development status of three Kaledupa villages will be produced by Eleanor MacDonald, University of Durham by May 2003.