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The Hunger Safety Net Program (HSNP), providing regular monthly cash transfers to beneficiaries, and Index Based Livestock Insurance (IBLI) Project, promoting and offering micro-insurance to protect pastoralists against livestock losses common in the face of drought, jointly operate in Marsabit district of northern Kenya. Because of the potential for confounding and interaction effects of both projects and given obvious room for research collaboration, the monitoring and evaluation (M&E) sub-component of the IBLI project, run by the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) in collaboration with Cornell University and other partners, was strategically designed to overlap and complement the HSNP M&E undertaken by Oxford Policy Management (OPM) and its partners.

As the data sets from both projects are now made publicly available and research findings about the impacts of these projects (separately, jointly, and comparatively) begin to be released, the Cornell-IBLI team thought it would be useful to provide a comparison of the two surveys, particularly since disparities may result in uneven interpretation of program impacts. Differences may arise from–among other things–variations in survey design, sampling strategy, data collection procedures, and data cleaning methodologies. In order to uncover these potential differences, we make a systematic study of the two surveys and compare baseline statistics across a number of indicators. The information underlying the discussion that follows is drawn from the publicly available codebooks and data sets for each project, unless otherwise noted. 1