The BNS & NRGT are standard surveys that we use in WCS for Monitoring & Evaluation purposes.
BNS stands for Basic Necessities Survey. It can be used to determine what a group of people (a community, a village, etc.) believe to be life’s necessities, and whether they have those necessities, resulting in a Well-Being Index. This is useful to determine how conservation interventions are impacting people.
NRGT stands for Natural Resources Governance Tool. It can be used to determine whether a local governance group has the authority, the capacity and the power to actually govern natural resources in their jurisdiction.
Technical manuals are available in various languages, here for the BNS and here for the NRGT.
A training video in French for the BNS can be seen here.
The recordings of a BNS & NRGT webinar held in September 2021 are here.
KoboToolbox is the platform we use to collect and manage BNS and NRGT data. Here are the KoboToolbox template survey forms:
BNS household form
BNS price of goods form
NRGT form
We typically use them at the protected area level.
Often, with the BNS, what are considered basic goods and services vary from a geographic area to another, so the list of basic necessities will change. However, as the Well-Being Index is a percentage of what people actually have compared to what they think they should have, you can compare results between different areas.
The NRGT results are also standardised scores that can be compared between different governance groups in different areas.
Most poverty measures are based on an external estimate of a poverty line, for example living with less than 2 USD a day. With the BNS, the local communities themselves decide what is necessary to live, and the tool works with communities who are outside of formal economic systems.
From our experience, using electronic devices is well received by the communities who participated in the BNS and the NRGT. It is most important for people that the surveys do not take too much of their time and that they can see benefits from participating in WCS projects rather than what device is used for surveys.
Overall, there have been far fewer data loss issues with electronic devices than with paper. To reduce the risk of losing data, protect your devices with waterproof/shockproof cases and keep them in a secured place.
You can ask the surveyors if they are more comfortable with smartphones or tablets. The KoboCollect app runs only on Android systems, but Enketo can run on any system. Choose a device that has a screen of minimum 7 inches, and a long battery life. You can go for rugged devices if resources allow.
For BNS surveys, a sample of 300 to 500 households is usually aimed for, although we recommend you do a power analysis to determine the sample size you will need to be able to detect a change in well-being of a given size with a given degree of confidence (statistical power).
For NRGT surveys, a sample size of 12 to 20 respondents for each governance group assessed is sufficient, provided that it is representative of the population that the group governs. The sample should include a balanced representation of women and men, social and age classes, governance group members and members of the governed community.
Yes, please feel free to send a request for analyses to ddetoeuf@wcs.org.