The Arlit Mines: Gathering and structuring information (2) Relevancy of potential indicators

 

Assessing the relevancy of potential indicators was again based on a participatory process, involving the same stakeholder groups in Niger as during the first phase of issue definition.  However, this time meetings were not individual but based on the focus-group technique, whose objective is to stimulate dialogue between participants in a small group on a specific theme, encouraged by a moderator.

 

To ensure that people could freely express themselves, the groups consisted of actors from the same stakeholder category.  Fifteen meetings took place, engaging a total of 80 persons, 97% of whom were Nigerian.

 

However, the balance across stakeholder types was not even as two of the broad stakeholder categories — internal stakeholders (6 groups and 34 people) and coordinating authorities (6 groups and 30 people) — were relatively more strongly represented than the others. 

 

Each focus group was asked to agree on a maximum of five indicators, deemed to be the most pertinent for each of the nine issue categories.  They were free, however, to formulate new indicator proposals if this was felt to be necessary.  This ceiling of five indicators, which some participants found frustrating, had the double objective of reducing the total number of indicators to obtain a workable data set (more or less homogeneously distributed amongst the nine categories) and of fostering dialogue between participants.