case of Hill region) were considered for the purpose. These strata were defined by the
project based on the premise that, economic and social factors influence the use and
management of plant genetic resources. Wealth ranking was done prior to the base line
survey during the PRA studies of the selected sites based on farmers own criteria. The
sampling structure and sample size of different strata are presented in table below (Table 2)
Table 2. Sample HHs from different categories in 4 sites of the home garden project
Wealth Gulmi Rupandehi Jhapa Ilam
category
Ethnic
category Total
HHSampled
HHTotal
HHSampled
HHTotal
HHSampled
HHTotal
HHSampled
HH
A 1 181 39 100 14 57 16 42 10
2 4 1 14 2 32 8 42 11
B 1 107 22 186 26 51 14 42 10
2 10 3 69 10 25 6 65 16
C 1 87 19 230 32 30 8 30 8
2 26 6 35 6 140 38 145 35
Total 415 90 634 90 335 90 366 90
Note: The ethnic categories: For Terai region (Rupandehi and Jhapa), 1 is for Pahadia (hill migrants)
and 2 for Terai community. For Ilam and Gulmi, 1 is for Brahmin/Chhetris and 2 for Rai/Magar/Limbu
in Ilam and Kami/Damai/Sarki in Gulmi
Field administration of questionnaires
The staffs involved in the field survey were briefed on the objectives of the baseline study.
Tips on data collection and effective data maintenance with appropriate cross checking were
given to the staff for the consistency of the data. Each staff was provided with the name lists
of the sampled household and social map (indicated with the sampled households) to collect
information effectively. Questionnaires were finalized after pre testing in Jhapa and Ilam.
The actual respondent of the household was identified as the one who was involved in most
of the decision making in agriculture related matters. Therefore, in some instances, the
household head was not necessarily involved in the survey process. In some cases, the
interview was conducted with more than one member as well. In order to get more effective,
consistent and qualitative data, generally four to five questionnaires were filled per day by an
individual. At the end of the day, the filled questionnaires were checked to confirm the
completeness and the quality of the information collected.
Data cleaning, editing, and analysis
The filled questionnaires were thoroughly checked by the responsible field staff and the team
members. Numeric coding of the filled questionnaires for the data entry was done.
Measurements taken in local units were converted to standard units before coding and
entering the data. SPSS-DOS data entry module was used for the data entry and SPSS/PC
was used for the statistical analysis. Descriptive statistics, chi-square tests and ANOVA were
applied for the data analysis.
RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS
Size of home gardens
We found the home garden size ranging from 17m^2 (0.0017 ha) to 5000m^2 (0.5 ha) and
generally larger in the Eastern region than in the western part of the country irrespective of
the hills and Terai (Table 3). (Sunwar 2003) has reported the average size of home gardens
as 434m^2 and 402m^2 in the western Terai and mid-hill regions of Nepal respectively. The
size of the home gardens is generally small in other countries as well (Eyzaguirre and
Linares, 2004). Home garden size ranges from 0.16-0.59 ha in Ghana (Owusu et al., 1994),