Trucking Industry Survey 2007

A trucking company is defined as a company that conducts trucking as its main operation and that has five or more full-time paid employees. A company conducting its own transportation is a company for whom trucking is not its main operation, that conducts the majority of its own transportation and that has five or more full-time paid employees. The companies surveyed serve at least one of the following routes:
o Kampala-Nairobi
o Kampala-Eldoret
o Kampala-Dar es salaam
o Kampala-Mombassa
o Kampala-Entebbe
o Kampala-Malaba
o Kampala-Mwanza
o Kampala-Kigali

The survey also sampled a selection of truckers (trucking operators with less than five full-time permanent paid employees) that serve the main roads listed above.

Companies with five or more full-time paid permanent employees: A list of Ugandan trucking operators was obtained from the Statistical Office. This list was completed and updated during the pilot survey. Following the results of the validation process, a sample frame consisting of a population of 47 establishments was drawn.

An attempt was made to contact each of these establishments. During the survey, it resulted that 4 establishments were closed, 14 establishments were out of scope or were unreachable despite repeated attempts by phone, 8 establishments refused to participate, and 21 establishments agreed to participate resulting in 21 completed trucking questionnaires, among which 4 trucking companies conducting their own transportation.

Truckers
In this survey, the trucker's stratum covers all establishments of the trucking industry with less than 5 employees. For many reasons, including the small size of establishments, their expected high rate of turnovers, the high level of ?informality? of establishments and consequently the difficulty to obtain trustworthy information from official sources, EEC Canada selected an aerial sampling approach to estimate the population of establishments and select the sample in this stratum according to the roads to be covered.

First, to randomly select individual truckers establishments for surveying, the following procedure was followed: i) select districts and specific zones of each district where there are lorry parks or where truckers usually off-loading; ii) count all truckers which generally stop in these specific lorry parks; iii) based on this count, create a virtual list and select establishments at random from that virtual list; and iv) based on the ratio between the number selected in each specific zone and the total population in that zone, create and apply a skip rule for selecting establishments in that zone.

The districts and the specific zones were selected at first according to our national sources. The EEC team then went in the field to verify these national sources and to count truckers. Once the count for each zone was completed, the numbers were sent back to EEC head office in Montreal.

At head office the following procedure was followed: the count by zone was converted into one list of sequential numbers for the whole survey region, and a computer program performed a random selection of the determined number of establishments from the list. Then, based on the number that the computer selected in each specific zone, a skip rule was defined to select truckers to survey in that zone. The skip rule for each zone was sent back to the EEC field team.

In Uganda, enumerators were sent to each zone with instructions as to how to apply the skip rule defined for that zone as well as how to select replacements in the event of a refusal or other cause of non-participation.