Great questions. Just for context, the Demographic and Health Surveys were primarily funded by USAID but that funding was terminated by the Trump administration in February. It involved surveys roughly every five years per country, for over 90 low- and middle-income countries worldwide since it started in 1985.
I think there are two parts to this: one is about the surveys that had started and were meant to be completed this year or next (that was in ~23 countries) and the other is about the longer-term future of the program.
I’m hopeful that the ongoing surveys can be funded and completed. It would be a real shame and quite wasteful if they weren’t, especially for those that had already started collecting data (or in some cases actually finished this). But I’m not certain, and there’s always a risk something else happens in the meantime, so hopefully continuing to write about it makes a difference.
In the longer term, I’m less sure. Having an independent organisation collect that data in a standard way across all those countries is really very valuable, and it’s across many topics (population sizes, maternal and child health, urban living, income, water & sanitation, etc.) and quite widely used by many researchers.
On how to do it more efficiently, I’m not the best person to ask but some rough thoughts. The surveys involve multiple ‘modules’, and one way might be to scale down some of the modules to be collected from a smaller, randomly selected subset of the overall population. Or some subnational surveys could be scaled down if national level data is considered enough; or maybe some modules could be shortened to focus on the key questions. But these all come with trade-offs and it really depends on what the priorities are.
Thanks so much!
Great questions. Just for context, the Demographic and Health Surveys were primarily funded by USAID but that funding was terminated by the Trump administration in February. It involved surveys roughly every five years per country, for over 90 low- and middle-income countries worldwide since it started in 1985.
I think there are two parts to this: one is about the surveys that had started and were meant to be completed this year or next (that was in ~23 countries) and the other is about the longer-term future of the program.
I’m hopeful that the ongoing surveys can be funded and completed. It would be a real shame and quite wasteful if they weren’t, especially for those that had already started collecting data (or in some cases actually finished this). But I’m not certain, and there’s always a risk something else happens in the meantime, so hopefully continuing to write about it makes a difference.
In the longer term, I’m less sure. Having an independent organisation collect that data in a standard way across all those countries is really very valuable, and it’s across many topics (population sizes, maternal and child health, urban living, income, water & sanitation, etc.) and quite widely used by many researchers.
On how to do it more efficiently, I’m not the best person to ask but some rough thoughts. The surveys involve multiple ‘modules’, and one way might be to scale down some of the modules to be collected from a smaller, randomly selected subset of the overall population. Or some subnational surveys could be scaled down if national level data is considered enough; or maybe some modules could be shortened to focus on the key questions. But these all come with trade-offs and it really depends on what the priorities are.