This is the third publication in a series exploring the ways scholars 
can balance methodology, budgeting, and fieldwork when completing a 
research project in the African peacebuilding landscape.

Introduction

Budgeting for fieldwork is an integral part of research methods. It is essential for developing a feasible, robust, and transparent research design. The research method selected is partly determined by the cost of personnel, time, local expertise, transportation, equipment, and security arrangements, including the required ethical safeguards. These costs must be identified and incorporated into the budget from the outset. In African peacebuilding research, it is important that budgeting responds to the realities of fragile and conflict-affected communities, where access, trust, safety, and timing can change rapidly.

How can researchers ensure that their methodological designs remain aligned with the resources available to implement them? This issue is central to the development of credible and ethical research. A sound budget should be closely aligned to the research methods and take the following into consideration: the study design, target population, sampling strategy, types and sources of data, recruitment and fair compensation of research assistants, fieldwork logistics, data management, and analysis.1 In conflict studies, the scope of the study and ethical considerations must be integrated into budget planning and execution. These require careful assessment of the locations where research will be conducted, the participants to be engaged, the procedures for recruiting and engaging research assistants, including appropriate compensation for their time, work, and potential exposure to risk.

Aligning methodological choices to available resources

In aligning methodology with available resources, the main research question should guide methodological choices and budgeting, rather than the appeal of expensive or fashionable research techniques and tools. Funding should support core activities, including scoping, baseline assessment, sampling, recruitment, training, travel, data collection, data analysis, validation, and dissemination.

Although digital methods may reduce costs, ground-truthing may still be necessary to verify local conditions and triangulate remote or secondary data. In conflict-affected settings, budgets must also respond to contextual realities, including geographical accessibility, local expertise, insecurity, displacement, road closures, and changing movement restrictions. These factors can significantly increase travel time and fieldwork costs. The aim should be to design the most credible and ethically sound study that available resources can reasonably support, rather than aiming for an ambitious study that looks very impressive on paper. Ethical considerations must be integrated from the scoping stage and should prioritize safe research locations, secure transportation, data protection, conflict-sensitive training, informed consent, and fair compensation for research personnel. Cost-saving should improve efficiency, safety, and welfare of research team members, participants and the protection of the integrity and quality of the data. Strategies may also include narrowing or reducing the number of study sites, clustering similar communities, avoiding duplicate visits, and using local expertise.2

Budgetary Alignment for Hybrid and Innovative Methodologies

Field data collection remains an indispensable mechanism for verifying spatial information and validating remotely collected data against real-world observations; the associated costs of fieldwork must therefore be systematically factored into research budgets. Even in studies at the peacebuilding–geography–environment nexus that deploy innovative tools such as GIS and remote sensing, ground-truthing is essential.3 Direct fieldwork is required to verify spatial data, validate analytical outputs, and ensure that findings accurately reflect conditions on the ground. The most effective budgeting approach depends on the complexity of the research or project, its goals, the degree of stakeholder involvement, and the quality of available data. Bottom-up budgeting provides greater accuracy in cost estimation, while activity-based budgeting enhances cost efficiency for clearly defined activities. Top-down budgeting, by contrast, supports strategic alignment with overall funding ceilings but may offer less precision at the activity level.4;5 Consistent with this logic, recent work on environmental geological mapping developed a multidimensional budget model grounded in cost-quota theory and field-log data. By linking standardized work units to actual resource inputs and applying geological-complexity and regional adjustments, the model keeps budget deviations below 3% in empirical tests, offering a more accurate and scalable alternative to traditional top-down geological survey budgeting.6

Experiences and Challenges

In peacebuilding research, researchers working within different institutions have variations in budgetary guidelines. While academic environments may be familiar with National Research Fund (NRF)-style budgeting, where personnel costs are clearly itemized, some organizations have minimum allocation for lead researchers. Funding guidelines may differ in their budgeting requirements. For example, a researcher may initially include a salary or stipend for the Principal Investigator, only to learn from the Funder that a particular fellowship award is intended to support the researcher’s work without providing separate remuneration for that role. This type of adjustment highlights the importance of understanding the specific eligibility criteria and budget rules of each funding scheme.

Budgetary assumptions should be explicit rather than vague. Researchers should clearly identify anticipated costs for personnel, equipment, travel, transportation, security, and ethical safeguards. These costs can vary considerably in fragile and conflict-affected settings. For example, fluctuations in the foreign exchange rate may affect the engagement of research personnel and reduce the purchasing power of the awardee. Similarly, communities that are accessible when a proposal is submitted may later become displaced or be difficult to reach. For instance, a journey that may initially take few minutes may require a longer time due to having to make a detour because of insecurity or restricted access, thereby increasing transportation and personnel costs. Such uncertainties make it essential to set aside an amount for contingencies. Researchers may also need to reduce the number or scope of fieldwork or study locations. A baseline assessment can help identify communities with similar characteristics, thereby avoiding unnecessary duplication and repeated visits. This process helps ensure that the study design and budget remain realistic, targeted, and proportionate to the research objectives. Unexpected challenges often arise once researchers enter communities. Participants may raise urgent needs, such as limited access to medical care or water, which fall outside the scope of the study. Researchers must remain focused on the approved research objectives while responding sensitively and avoiding unrealistic expectations. Security conditions may also change rapidly, requiring adjustments to planned activities, itineraries and routes, timelines, and expenditure. Drawing on my experience of preparing a fieldwork budget for research on insecurity in Northwestern Nigeria illustrated these points clearly. Coming from a university NRF-style system, I initially included my own costs as Principal Investigator, only to learn that the fellowship required me to exclude personal remuneration. This forced a careful rebalancing of the budget around personnel, security, and ethics rather than a fixed funding limit. Rapid changes in accessibility such as a 30-minute journey to Sayaya, a community in Musawa, Northwestern Nigeria, increasing to over three hours due to insecurity highlighted the need for realistic contingency arrangements. Scoping and baseline assessments further helped me narrow down my focus to locations with similar characteristics such as same conflict actors and timeline of conflict events, avoiding duplication while ensuring ethical engagement in fragile communities. These experiences confirmed that methods, ethics, and context must actively shape the budget and demonstrate why conflict-sensitive budgets must remain flexible while preserving ethical standards, participant safety, and data quality.

Conclusion

Preparing a fieldwork budget for research in conflict-affected areas yielded several practical lessons. First, methodological choices made at the design stage have immediate and sometimes irreversible cost implications once fieldwork begins; narrowing locations through baseline assessments, for example, proved more effective than attempting to cover too many sites with limited funds. Second, in fragile settings the most significant expenses are often not the most visible ones; for example securing safe transport, fair compensation for local assistants, and the ability to adapt when access routes change can determine whether data collection remains ethical and feasible. Third, treating the budget as a living document rather than a fixed funding cap allows researchers to respond to displacement, shifting security conditions, and community expectations without compromising core standards. Taken together, these insights suggest that effective budgeting in African peacebuilding research is less about maximizing one’s ambition and more about protecting the integrity of the research process by taking into consideration real-world constraints.

Overall, aligning research methods with fieldwork budgeting is central to ethical peacebuilding research in Africa. Budgets anchored in the explicit assumptions, realistic contingencies, and conflict-sensitive flexibility enable researchers to deliver methodologically sound, ethically robust projects that available resources can genuinely support, and enhance feasibility and impact.

Endnotes

  1. Higdon, Joseph, and Robert Topp. “How to develop a budget for a research proposal.” Western Journal of Nursing Research26, no. 8 (2004): 922-929.
  2. Bello, Innocent E. “Critical issues in the methods of data collection in geoinformatics and environmental sciences.” International Journal of Social Sciences and Management Research 9, no. 8 (2023): 18-28.
  3. Institute for Economics and Peace. 2017. “Measuring Peacebuilding Cost-Effectiveness.” Vision of Humanity, March 28, 2017. https://www.visionofhumanity.org/measuring-peacebuilding-cost-effectiveness/.
  4. Sonjaya, Yaya. “Exploring the evolution of budgeting practices from traditional to technology.” Advances in Management & Financial Reporting 2, no. 1 (2024): 36-45.
  5. Sunaryo, Dwi, Nofarina Maulida Yanti, Rifqi Amrulloh, and Tina Lestari. “Evaluation of traditional and innovative budget approaches in improving resource allocation efficiency.” Advances in Applied Accounting Research 3, no. 1 (2025): 55-68.
  6. Luo, Gan, Mingqi Tao, Wanyi Zhang, Shuai Zhong, and Chunqian Cao. “An integrated budget calculation model for environmental geological mapping.” Scientific Reports 16, no. 1 (2026): 11877.