"Dear Rick

...The information I collected through M&E news before I came away has been very useful - good case studies and ideas.

In particular I thought I would let you know that I have tried your tree map method for the first time. Despite thinking it sounded rather unlikely to be useful when I first read it, it has provided a very nice alternative to classic wealth ranking for investigating the structure of villages. The people I am working with had the same unease as I do about launching into wealth analysis. We therefore tried your method as it seemed to offer a way round the problem. We ask the number of families in the village, then ask about differences between them with respect to livestock and well-being. Following the process as you describe, we rapidly get a good idea of the wealth structure of villages, which is far more disparate than I had imagined. From this exercise it is possible to find people to interview in more detail from each category. Repeating the exercise with paravets, we then asked them to indicate what proportion of their work was with which group. This worked well and provided an indication of who was benefiting most from the services of the programme." Stephen Blakeway, Vetwork UK, at stephen@vetwork.abel.co.uk, 17 December 1998.

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