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Research in developing markets,
in a post-COVID world

COVID-19 has impacted research in many ways, but one of the foremost has been our ability to run face-to-face qualitative.

We were conducting digital research in many parts of the world long before March 2020, but in many areas of developing markets, less so. The challenges are different: connectivity, the affluence skew, and levels of digital and basic literacy. In conservative cultures, digital tools seemed potentially inappropriate; the threat of strangers preying via social media or mobile can be very real in daily life, especially for women.

But COVID-19 limited our choices – so we decided to trial an online-only study in a challenging environment to explore the possibilities.

 
 
 
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We know Nigeria from past work, as a vast, diverse, poorly understood and complex environment. But it’s also one which presents an enormous commercial opportunity due to its scale. We chose women as an audience, as culturally, they can be hard to reach even via face-to-face methods, so there were clear advantages if we could connect with them digitally. And from there, we took ‘life under COVID’ as our jumping-off point – having heard survival stories from Wuhan, LA, Brazil, and Singapore, but nothing about life in Kano in 2020. Plus we were aware COVID-19 has been shown to have had a greater impact on women’s lives than men’s, and felt it offered the opportunity to go deeper, on social norms and day-to-day experiences more generally.

So we began a digital-only study, with young women in Northern and Southern Nigeria. We chose WhatsApp as a platform, because it was the most immediately intuitive to women’s social circles. And we ran ongoing chat around moderated topics; a lockdown log; photo and video uploads. We kept to a female-only team from Basis, to maximise comfort, supported by insider help from regional (female) moderators.

 
 
 

What did we learn

about women's lives?

 
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Some aspects of life under corona are universal, like constant hand-washing, face covering and social distancing. (Some things were similar, but with local flavour: rather than public transport limitations, some of our participants had experienced a ban on using their bikes.) There was fear of catching COVID-19, conspiracy theories, as well as financial impact and questions over benefits of lockdown.

But what was different: how much more extreme the stakes were. Some of our women’s lockdown-related fears were of people starving locally – and there was increased awareness of rape cases, kidnappings, and gangs looting in local areas. We heard tales of deaths from consulting unqualified medics, and food prices spiking by 300%. This is in a context where Boko Haram, child marriage and FGM aren’t far from habitual or normal experience, for some; and where the impact of other pandemics like ebola had been felt in the past. But coronavirus’s impact had been greater than that of ebola, especially for women.

This was felt at home, in often single-handed childcare and home-schooling, but also commercially. Even in normal times in Nigeria, legal frameworks limit roles women can play at work, and discrimination on gender is legitimate.

“Buildings, companies, and factories… All these are mostly centred around men.”
— As one of our participants, Amal, explained

This means many women have to work in self-employed roles, in sales of goods, as “hustlers” as they described to us. But coronavirus had had a terrifying impact on this ability to sell, because demand and their opportunity to sell or export had been cut. And so, therefore, had their stream of any money for themselves.

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This led us into deeper conversations about “lazy, stingy men” and the place of women in Nigerian society – which is where regional and cultural differences shone through. Whilst many of our more traditional respondents in Northern Nigeria were content with a culture of submission to men as the “head of the family”, in the South, we heard more frustration at women’s perceived “weakness”, a strong sense of injustice, and hunger for change.

But there were shafts of light in COVID-19 experiences too. It became clear how much young Nigerian women are supported by their peers (whilst their mothers, men, and wider society expected them to settle down and follow a traditional path). Friends gave tutorials on baking and sewing to help increase others’ commercial opportunities, or showed them how to sell mobile phone airtime or market their business on Instagram. For some of our participants, lockdown had given them the time, or forced them, based on the lack of alternative, to adapt to a wider range of digital tools and platforms.

“As a result of the lockdown I’ve even made money for the first time online.”
— For Safiya, in Ibadan

Skills were learned which would support women in their ambition to grow their businesses, make their own money and be financially independent – post COVID and beyond.

 

 
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What did we learn about

WhatsApp as a platform?

 
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We felt we had genuinely privileged access to so much. We love focus groups; but we learned more on this topic, this way, than we would have face-to-face. WhatsApp is an amazing qualitative vehicle (only slightly let down by privacy limitations) – because these women used it for commercial and social purposes already. So they were engaged, open; they typed with emojis, shared Snapchat-filtered pics and jokes. This level of contribution surprised us initially, but when we thought about it – how much do many of us share on WhatsApp now, about our lives and how we feel? Do we all say things there we might not bother to say, or find as easy to say, in person? This is where the WhatsApp dynamic is so useful; people are already at ease.

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We learned a lot about how to maximise it as a platform too. We spoke to our respondents in groups; this felt familiar, and most like a ‘normal’ group chat, where there’s no pressure on anyone but everyone is welcome to speak.

Dialogue flowed best with a constantly-moderated stream of probes and new questions, and use of the Reply function to specific messages, for clarity of what was needed from who. Even with conversation in English, regional moderation was necessary, to know where to push and where not to. There were tasks that worked better, like self-shot videos, which told us a million things very quickly. The Google Images collage task we set told us nothing – because everyone draws from the same bank of pictures, and it was harder to gauge what aspects participants felt different images communicated. Our two-phase process was invaluable, allowing us to re-focus for the second stage on just the most compelling aspects from the first.

Of course, there are limitations, particularly in terms of digital skew. We can pay for people’s mobile data to thank them for participating, but not everyone (especially women) has an internet-enabled phone and the ability to use it. That said: internet penetration is predicted to be 84+% in Nigeria by 2023, so it’s an evolving situation. And for many of our clients, the audience we spoke to would be the primary opportunity.

Plus with WhatsApp specifically, privacy is a pain. It’s encrypted, but hiding your number from others in a group is, so far, impossible (however many YouTube videos we watched which promised to do this). There are workarounds, like broadcast mode or a Business page, but they would lose the group experience. We made sure respondents were aware of that in advance and gave fully informed consent – and in our case, many used WhatsApp for sales and were accustomed to having lots of numbers in groups, so it wasn’t a problem. But elsewhere it could have been. There are other apps, but they’d be less familiar. 

Analytically too: WhatsApp definitely isn’t designed for sorting through many people’s responses.

 
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Would we do it again?

Yes. We’re now confident that, for the right project and especially under COVID restrictions on travel and face-to-face attendance, WhatsApp works fantastically well as a qualitative platform. As well as on digital-only projects, we’d use it additionally to other studies: as a framework for capturing super-rich user-generated content. Like any tool, it has strengths and weaknesses, so it’s about deploying it appropriately. But we emerged from this process with a richer sense of what it means to be a woman in Nigeria today than we’d ever imagined, via an approach which felt authentic and intuitive to our participants’ lives.

 
 
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Want to learn more?

 
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Written by Charlotte Smith, Global Head of Qualitative at Basis

 
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