As IFES celebrates its 20th anniversary, Research Manager Rakesh Sharma quietly marked 10 years at IFES by planning a new year of innovative survey work.

When Sharma began as a research assistant in January 1997, IFES undertook only general population surveys. In addition to national surveys, IFES’ work now includes more sophisticated and targeted surveys diversified in subject and scope.

“You can tell the breadth of our surveys by what we’re going to be doing this year,” Sharma said. The agenda of more than 10 surveys this year encompasses work in Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Thailand and Nigeria. In addition, IFES will conduct its first surveys in the U.S. with three national surveys to help the Elections Assistance Commission identify election needs around the country.

IFES also anticipates breaking new ground with surveys focused on conflict resolution. A planned project in Serbia will use surveys to develop a tool to gauge the level of tensions in border regions near Kosovo and Montenegro. The project comes as the United Nations status talks on Kosovo come to an end and just months after Montenegro voted to declare independence from Serbia. Now, as more Serbians relocate from Kosovo and Montenegro, democracy activists worry that established Serbs in the border regions will begin to resent the newcomers.

Next month, IFES will release the third in a series of surveys on the first direct election for mayoral and gubernatorial posts in Aceh, Indonesia. Sharma visited Aceh prior to the December election and said the Acehnese people seemed at ease under the Free Aceh Movement’s peace agreement with the Indonesian government.

“After nearly 30 years of on-off insurgency, what I heard from people is that there was just so much more freedom now to move around and to talk,” he said. “Then the fact that they were going to be able to determine their political leaders in what everybody would consider the first free elections in quite a while in Aceh also was something that people were excited about.”

Sharma said he hopes this third survey will reveal the reasons behind the election’s “very unexpected results”. Pre-election surveys indicated that no candidate would receive the required 25 percent of the vote to avoid a run-off election. But former guerilla leader Irwandi Yusuf won the race to be Aceh’s governor with 40 percent of the votes.

“There were a large chunk of undecided or undeclared voters in the pre-election survey, and it seems that a large majority of those people voted for Irwandi instead of the other seven candidates. It may be that many people in an Aceh emerging from a long conflict felt it was not prudent to reveal that they may vote for a former guerilla leader.” Sharma said.

“In the end, it’s the election and the people who vote who decide and they totally surprised everyone this time,” he said, adding that the third survey might reveal the factors that led to Irwandi winning by such a large margin.

Sharma is probably one of IFES’ most widely traveled employees. Despite the difficulty of being away from his wife and two small children, Sharma relishes the chance to travel. Presenting survey results to local leaders is one of the most rewarding parts of his job, he said.

“Because very often survey data tends to be opposed to what people think is happening in a country or what people think about a certain situation in a country—to see the reactions from data that is unexpected is interesting,” said Sharma.

IFES has conducted special surveys in areas rarely covered by polls. In 2002, IFES field staff developed a “first-of-its-kind” survey of inhabitants of Indonesia’s Papua province that included interviews with indigenous groups in remote areas of the province not normally covered by surveys. The survey covered a range of issues including infrastructure and educational needs.

“The sort of data we got in that survey did not necessarily exist,” Sharma said. “The data from that survey was presented to the governor of Papua and the data was later used in budgeting seminars.”

On some occasions, the research staff of contractors hired by IFES has felt threatened by hostility or extreme conditions. In Indonesia, a team that had traveled in the path of a storm was out of touch for two days and their colleagues feared the worst was feared until the team finally checked in from an island where it had been stranded.

But most often, pollsters travel to remote regions without incident and find people eager to answer questions. In Azerbaijan’s capital Baku, IFES has had response rates lower than 50 percent “because people in Baku are getting surveyed all the time, not just by social pollsters, but by marketing polling…so they just won’t open doors,” Sharma said. In contrast, polls in rural areas achieve response rates of about 75 percent.

“Our contractor in Azerbaijan always tells us that in rural areas our survey can last 45 minutes, 50 minutes, even longer with an older resident,” Sharma said. “Yet, so many people at the end of the survey say ‘This is great, we never get the chance to talk politics like this.’”