McCormick+Schmitz Handbook for value chain research on - PACA

The first step is to gather basic in<strong>for</strong>mation about those you intend to study. If you are
doing a full <strong>chain</strong> analysis, you would include participants at each level of the <strong>chain</strong>. The
basic in<strong>for</strong>mation is of three main types:
• Demographic data such as sex, age, marital status, level of education, and level
and type of training;
• Labour <strong>for</strong>ce data, such as years in present job, previous experience, rate of pay,
benefits, and working conditions; and
• In<strong>for</strong>mation about their roles in the household, community, and garment industry.
The first two groups of in<strong>for</strong>mation are basically quantitative. Some data may be available
from company records. For outworkers, you may have to gather the in<strong>for</strong>mation yourself.
Some of the ‘role’ in<strong>for</strong>mation may also be available in personnel records, but most likely
you will have to get much of it through interviews with workers or knowledgeable
individuals.
The second step is to gather additional in<strong>for</strong>mation to enable you to make comparisons.
You may want to compare workers in this industry with those in the country as a whole,
or with garment workers elsewhere. To do this, you need data on those groups. In some
countries, they may be available from labour <strong>for</strong>ce surveys or a government statistical data
base.
The third step is an institutional assessment. This aims at telling you how things are
usually done. The fourth step is the application in which you use the results of the first
three steps to answer the questions that prompted your gender analysis.
To make this somewhat abstract explanation more concrete, we offer an example (see
Table 16.2).
The example is a hypothetical <strong>chain</strong> segment covering manufacturers in a developing
country exporting men’s and boys’ shirts to the US market. The <strong>chain</strong> includes suppliers,
producers, and various types of intermediaries, but <strong>for</strong> the sake of simplicity, the data in
the figure are <strong>for</strong> producers only.
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