My PhD Data Collection Journey: Field Trip to Malawi

Mavuto Kambochola Banda

PhD student, Living with the Consequences of Slavery Cluster

Wilberforce Institute, University of Hull

M.K.BANDA-2020@hull.ac.uk

Data collection is a critical part of primary research. In my study of the impact of child labour bans in Malawi’s agriculture on the lived experiences of children, their families and communities, it was necessary to meet the people involved. In this blog, I will take you through my field data collection journey.

Planning the trip

After getting research ethics approval from the University of Hull’s Faculty of Science and Engineering, the next step was getting research ethics clearance in Malawi. For someone studying at a foreign institution to be able to carry out research in Malawi, there are two options to follow in order to get ethics approval before collecting data. The first option is applying for and getting ethics clearance through the National Commission of Science and Technology where a relevant committee depending on your area of study looks into your application and provides feedback. On the other hand, one can also get research ethics clearance through a local research institution such as universities and organisations. I followed the second option and was attached to the Malawi University of Science and Technology (MUST)’s Center for Innovation and Industrial Research (CIIR). I applied for research ethics clearance from the MUST Research Ethics Committee (MUSTREC), and I got my ethics clearance approval early in January 2022. I have learnt a lot about academic and administrative processes that must be followed when conducting research in a different country from your where your institution is based.

My six months stay at MUST is memorable as I was exposed to valuable research and collaborations within the CIIR. What excited me most was that research the CIIR is skewed towards industry challenges in key sectors of the Malawian and regional economy in agriculture, health and education sectors among others. The set up at the CIIR is identical to my parent institute, the Wilberforce Institute for the study of Slavery and Emancipation at the University of Hull. The Wilberforce Institute is well known for its research on historical and contemporary slavery and in recent years, has developed interests in researching children’s exploitation, working closely with practitioners in these sectors. Apart from providing me with an office space and internet connection, I was involved in developing the academic progress monitoring system for postgraduate students under the CIIR and in reviewing MUST’s postgraduate handbook. I gained valuable skills through my involvement in these activities, and I am grateful to the staff in the CIIR and MUST at large for their support during my stay there.

Field work

After getting all the required clearance and I began talking to stakeholders on the ground to start planning field data collection trips. I first engaged with the Ministry of Labour who were so helpful and gave me contacts for district labour officers of Thyolo, Mulanje and Zomba Districts where I planned to engage the communities living around commercial tea and tobacco estates. The next stage was to visit the labour offices of each of these districts. My engagement with the labour officers was so enlightening and informed my selection of communities and other stakeholders I needed to talk to.

The highlight of this engagement with district labour officers was at Thyolo District Council. When I met the labour officer for Thyolo, I was informed and invited to the scheduled District Child Labour Committee (DCLC) meeting. To say I got valuable tips on the fight against child labour in the districts might be an understatement. The DCLC meeting drew together all stakeholders in anti-child labour programmes in the district including representatives from the district labour office, district social welfare office, district gender office, district agriculture office, the judiciary, district education office, district youth office, youth organisations, traditional leaders and the NGOs community among others. With the level and clarity of information I got from the meeting, I felt that I gained all I needed to know about child labour in the district, from programmes on the ground, and challenges and steps being taken to ensure all children are protected in the district. Coming at the start of my field data collection, the DCLC meeting energised me and re-invigorated my purpose. It reminded me why it is so important to research about the lived experiences of children, families and communities after children were banned from working in the commercial tea and tobacco estates.

From the district councils, I went straight onto the ground to meet local leaders starting with traditional authorities (T/As), then group village heads (GVH) and then village heads where potential respondents were to be drawn from. Overall, I managed to match or exceed the research targets I had set myself. I had planned to reach 120 survey respondents, I managed to reach 132. On focus group discussions, I had planned to conduct 18 and achieved 18. Finally, on interviews, I conducted 29 interviews out of the 30 I had planned.

Challenges

Let me sign out by highlighting some of the challenges faced during data collection. The biggest challenge was access to research funds. Before traveling to Malawi, I had arranged with my bank to get access to my bank account while in Malawi. Unfortunately, this was not possible, and as I could not access the funds this delayed my field work as I needed the funds to pay field research assistants. The university finance department and my supervisors were so helpful in rectifying the financial hiccup. Another delay of field data collection occurred when some areas became inaccessible by road after tropical cyclone Ana brought heavy rains early in 2022. And as if these setbacks were not enough, I got sick with chicken pox and lost almost 3 weeks research time. Nevertheless, as I now go through the processing of my data, I am so happy with the volume and diversity of the data I have.

Image: Tea estate road in south eastern Malawi Source: Mavuto Banda

Fieldwork: a time to learn from the ‘lived experiences of children and families’ in tea and tobacco communities

Mavuto K. Banda

PhD student, Living with the Consequences of Slavery Cluster

Wilberforce Institute, University of Hull

M.K.Banda-2020@hull.ac.uk

Malawi is an agriculture-based economy where tea and tobacco contribute about 70% of total annual export earnings, 60% of which comes from tobacco alone. As one of the countries that ratified the International Labour Organisation’s (ILO) Convention 138 on Minimum Age of Employment, and Convention 182 on Worst Forms of Child Labour, the Malawi Government has put in place policies and legal instruments to operationalise its international obligations and committed itself to combat child labour. According to the Employment Act (2000), the minimum age for entry into employment in Malawi is 14; however, work in tea and tobacco production is considered hazardous to children, and so the minimum age of employment is pegged at 18.

Agriculture is the single largest employer, sustaining livelihoods mainly through subsistence farming and part-time work locally known as ganyu in addition to jobs provided by commercial estates such as tea and tobacco. Over 84% of Malawians live in rural areas and agriculture employs 85% of working males and 94% of females.

Led by multinationals and supported by the government and its local and international stakeholders (NGOs and UN agencies), Malawi has implemented interventions to keep children from tea and tobacco work since the early 2000s. Children are banned from working in commercial tea and tobacco estates, as work in these sectors is considered hazardous and detrimental to children’s growth and development by ILO standards. These bans were and are still predominantly upheld by players in tea and tobacco as a direct response to accountability pressures from consumers in Europe and North America, where most of the tea and tobacco exports from Malawi are destined. Further pressure comes from international organisations and UN agencies such as the ILO and UNICEF.

However, in recent years, reports of children’s continued participation, especially in tobacco production, shocked the international community and threatened the country’s export earnings and by extension, its economy. In 2019, the US government banned the importation of tobacco from Malawi, which was thought to have been produced using exploitative children’s work.

For commercial tea and tobacco estates, and indeed for the country, banning children’s work from tea and tobacco – probably the most outbound globally connected value chains in the Malawian economy – lowers reputational risks, which appear to be responding to consumer demands for accountability. However, little is known about the impact these bans are having on the lived experiences of children who no longer have the opportunity to work in commercial tea and tobacco estates.

This is what my study, therefore, aims to examine – the impact on under-18-year-olds of the ban from working in tea and tobacco plantations. I will be asking the following set of guiding questions:

1) To what extent have the universal minimum age policy interventions contributed to the elimination of child labour in tea and tobacco-growing communities?

2) How have the universalised minimum age policies and related interventions influenced the lives of children, their families and their communities?

3) How could interventions relating to child labour elimination in tea and tobacco-growing communities protect and empower children, families and communities?

I have decided to use the following investgative techniques to collect data: I will conduct key informant interviews targeting service providers and community leaders; set up focus group discussions; and create survey questionnaires targeting household members. The study will be conducted in the Southern Region districts of Thyolo and Mulanje (for tea production) and Zomba (for tobacco production).

I am grateful to the Malawi University of Science and Technology (MUST)’s Center for Innovation and Industrial Research (CIIR) in Thyolo District for offering to host me during the period of fieldwork. Their various capacity-building initiatives will enrich my research experience and further my career development. In addition, the stay at MUST will ensure that I have an office and access to the internet when I am not in the field for reporting and reading. In turn, I will dedicate four hours per week to any work assigned to me by the CIIR.

I now have the ethics approval from the Faculty of Science and Engineering (FoSE) at the University of Hull and am in the process of applying for ethics approval with MUST’s research committee. Once I get the MUST research ethics approval, I can begin my fieldwork with stakeholder mapping and consultations before field data collection proper begins. With over 60% of research costs secured, I am in the process of applying for the shortfall from the National Commission of Science and Technology (NCST)’s Small Grant Scheme, designed to support postgraduate students in research.

All in all, I am very excited to enter the field data collection phase of my PhD studies. With the support I am getting both at the University of Hull and MUST, I hope this will be successful fieldwork.

Caption: Mavuto K. Banda in Mulanje tea fields, Southern Malawi (Source: Mavuto K. Banda, 2016)

Living with the consequences of slavery

Isabel Arce Zelada

PhD student on the ‘Living with the consequences of slavery’ cluster

Wilberforce Institute, University of Hull

i.d.arce-zelada-2020@hull.ac.uk

Jen Nghishitende

PhD student on the ‘Living with the consequences of slavery’ cluster

Wilberforce Institute, University of Hull

n.j.nghishitende-2020@hull.ac.uk

Mavuto K. Banda

PhD student on the ‘Living with the consequences of slavery’ cluster

Wilberforce Institute, University of Hull

m.k.banda-2020@hull.ac.uk

Five months in, our three newest PhD students, Isabel Arce Zelada, Jen Nghishitende and Mavuto Banda, reflect on their collective agenda and their individual research projects so far.

We started our PhDs in the midst of a pandemic and as a cluster we have had little opportunity to work together and understand how our projects interlink. However, through various zoom calls and physically distant interactions we are beginning to understand where we belong in this cluster as a team as well as individually. As a cohesive unit we found that we each speak about the way various institutions constantly ask groups of people with different experiences of exploitation to present themselves as victims. This establishes a uniform ‘humanitarian’ response to problems that involve a multiplicity of experiences, and in the process creates and recreates the model of what a victim is and what they need. At the core of all our projects are individuals who constantly have to prove themselves to be victims in order to get some level of assistance. As such, we are, as a collective, critically investigating what we mean when we say ‘victim’ and what solutions we need to achieve to assist this group of individuals.

Isabel

In asylum processes the idea that the nation-state is providing safety to a person seeking persecution has a long and complicated history. As an institution asylum has always led to wide networks of power in which many other institutions are involved. In the UK, the rise of nationalistic sentiments, detention centres and hostile environments have led to an awkward paradox in which the UK saves the asylum seeker, yet also condemns them for a role in the demise of the British nation. At the same time, the asylum system keeps its humanitarian role by supposedly saving the true refugee. I am therefore researching the many violent tactics of distrust and retraumatization that are present in the UK asylum process.

Jen

My research deals with women and children who have survived modern slavery in the UK and as such, I will be focusing on those people who have already either been accepted or rejected as ‘victims’ by the UK Home Office. In recent years, the spotlight has been placed on survivors’ accounts, their tales of slavery and their eventual escape or rescue; scant attention has been placed on what happens to survivors after slavery, especially in the long term. My research will therefore examine the long term trajectories of survivors in the UK, all the while looking at the laws, policies, and processes that are in place to assist them with rehabilitation and reintegration into society in order to regain their rights and dignity.

Mavuto

My research looks from a different perspective at the children that have become the victims of modern slavery. In adhering to Fairtrade standards and safeguarding their corporate image, Malawi’s commercial agriculture has banned the employment of under-18 year olds in its plantations, as it seeks to prevent and rescue children from the evils of ‘child labour’. Once the work of under-18 year olds in commercial tea and tobacco plantations had been defined as ‘child labour’ this ban became necessary. My study therefore aims at exploring the impact of ‘child labour’ bans in commercial tea and tobacco estates with respect to youth employment and livelihoods in rural communities of Malawi. It will try to understand the socio-cultural dynamics of life in Malawi, and how communities view children’s participation in the labour market.

Henry Ford once said, ‘Coming together is the beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.’ Our continual working relationship will therefore lead to the collective success of our cluster as well as our individual successes in our research projects. We also look forward to hopefully meeting and working with everyone soon in person at the Wilberforce Institute. Our shared hope for the future is that victimhood, with the pressures of presenting oneself as the perfect victim, is scrutinized, and the assistance that is needed is given without requesting trauma as payment for it.

Protective medical mask on laptop. https://www.flickr.com/photos/156445661@N02/49799314177

‘Living with the Consequences of Slavery’ PhD Cluster

Dr Lorena Arocha

Lecturer in Contemporary Slavery, Wilberforce Institute

lorena.arocha@hull.ac.uk

This month we are delighted to welcome three new PhD students to the Wilberforce Institute. They are all part of the ‘Living with the Consequences of Slavery’ PhD Cluster, a strategic investment for the Wilberforce Institute and the University of Hull in this field.

The position we have taken with this PhD Cluster is that it is not evil people that create victims but systems. Criminal justice studies have historically been more concerned with the punishment of the offender, but our new students’ research sits with recent moves to re-centre attention critically on the relational shared experiences of victims/survivors and non-victims. Each of these individual projects therefore explores key questions that go beyond the individual person affected by these practices, examining instead the effects of systematic and rooted processes of exploitation, its relation with processes of victimhood and their intersection with questions of social justice and social rights.

The ‘Living with the Consequences of Slavery’ PhD Cluster examines contemporary forms of slavery from three different angles of critical victimology. The first project is led by Jennifer Nghishitende, who will be looking at what happens after people have experienced exploitation, how people make sense of these experiences and how they then move on with their lives, especially in the longer-term, with an emphasis on questions of dignity and rights.

Jennifer Nghishitende

‘Living with the Consequences of Slavery’ PhD Research Cluster

n.j.nghishitende-2020@hull.ac.uk

The second project is led by Isabel Arce Zelada, whose investigation centres on testimonies, in asylum courts and beyond, and the extent to which these deliver justice.

Isabel Arce Zelada

‘Living with the Consequences of Slavery’ PhD Research Cluster

i.d.arce-zelada-2020@hull.ac.uk

The third project, led by Mavuto Kambochola Banda, focuses on tea plantations in Malawi. Mavuto will examine the unintended consequences of policy measures which are put in place to tackle contemporary forms of slavery. Such interventions can adversely affect the lives of those they intend to assist.

Mavuto Kambochola Banda

‘Living with the Consequences of Slavery’ PhD Research Cluster

m.k.banda-2020@hull.ac.uk

The ‘Living with the consequences of slavery’ Cluster will therefore look at these problematics from opposite directions: on the one hand, from the perspective of those who have experienced exploitation and its relation with victimisation processes in contemporary forms of slavery; and, on the other, from the perspective of those who have been disadvantaged as a result of humanitarian anti-slavery measures. This, we believe, offers an exceptional opportunity to gain a more comprehensive picture of the complexity of practices and processes that drive exploitation experiences as well as an in-depth understanding of the impact of these experiences in the long term.

The theme of critical victimology, which marks a new direction for the Wilberforce Institute, is composed of two strands. Alongside our investment in the PhD scholarships we are introducing an MA programme in Contemporary Slavery Studies and Critical Victimology, due to start in February 2021. The MA offers our new PhD students a platform and a community with whom to share their research. We are hoping they will inspire others to engage in this critical area of study.

We have high expectations for our new PhD students, and are looking forward to guiding and supporting them through their studies. They will be based at the Wilberforce Institute when they are not away on research, working with a team of supervisors across various disciplines, in Human Geography, Social Sciences, Criminology and Law. We are excited by the prospect of seeing their research projects develop as they grow as scholars.