Annex 4: Presentation of main statistical operations for monitoring poverty and household living conditions

1. General Population and Housing Survey

Objectives

The aim is to update the demographic, social and economic profile of the population of a country.

Areas covered

• housing profile;
• socio-demographic profile including age, gender, disabilities, residence status, matrimonial status;
• activies;
• migrations;
• etc.

Scope and sample

The scope is national and findings are disseminated to the smallest administrative unit owing to the comprehensive nature of collected data.

2. Household living conditions survey

Objectives

The overarching objective of the survey is to track and gauge household living conditions in general and the poverty reduction programme specifically.

The goals include:

• studying monetary poverty, poverty in terms of household living conditions, subjective poverty and poverty of potentials;
• building databases to improve various statistics, notably estimating household consumption in national accounts and updating price index weighting calculations.

Areas covered

• socio-demographic profile;
• housing profile;
• income and expenditure;
• health;
• education;
• employment;
• agriculture;
• access to basic services;
• etc.

Scope and sample

The scope of the survey is the entire national territory and findings profile each region[1] and area (urban/rural).

The size of the sample is about 10 000 households. (Depending on the size of the country)

3. Population and health survey

Objectives

PHS seeks to provide data on population and health.

Areas covered

• socio-demographic profile;
• housing profile;
• level of education and enrolment rate;
• fertility and contraception use;
• pre-natal care and birth attendance;
• immunization and treatment of infant diseases;
• infant nutritional status and mortality;
• anthropometrics;
• HIV/AIDS knowledge and prevalence;
• health and fertility behaviour;
• availability of community services;
• etc.

Scope

The scope is countrywide and findings will be published by survey region and by area of residence (urban/rural).

The size of the sample is approximately 12 000 households. (depending on the size of the country)

4. Multiple Indicator Cluster Sample Survey (MICS)

Objective

MICS seeks to gauge progress in the achievement of the objectives of the national child welfare programme.

Areas covered

• population profile;
• housing profile;
• water, hygiene and sanitation;
• education and literacy;
• child labour;
• women’s and child health;
• immunization of women and children;
• contraception use;
• etc.

Scope and sample

The scope is national and findings are published by survey region and area of residence (urban/rural).

The size of the sample is approximately 5 000 households. (Depending on the size of the country)

5. 1-2-3 Survey

Objective

The specific objective is to track employment, the informal sector and household consumption which are key factors in tracking poverty and other socioeconomic areas like education, governance and democracy.

Areas covered

For each survey,

• profile of housing and household assets;
• enrolment and literacy.

Employment

• profile of employment, under-employment and unemployment in respect of training and personal goals
• conditions for exercising activities.

Informal sector

• modus operandi, labour force and employment;
• contribution of the informal sector to the economy;
• problems and prospects of the informal sector.

Household consumption

• household consumer spending;
• household living conditions;

Education

• enrolment and pass rate at various levels;
• school mobility, inequalities;
• differences in behaviour and prospects and household education needs.

Governance and democracy

• population’s appraisal of government services;
• population’s appraisal of the role of the State (on what it does or should do);
• links between democracy, its efficient functioning, social value systems and living conditions of the population.

Scope and sample

The scope is national and findings are published by survey region and area of residence (urban/rural).

The sample size is about 9 000 households for the Employment phase and 5 000 informal production units for the Informal Sector. (Depending on the size of the country)

In a minimum system, the employment phase runs every two years, the informal sector every four years and the other phases upon requests.

6. CWIQ survey

Objective

The CWIQ survey has two major objectives:

• providing useful household statistics for the sake of designing and evaluating socioeconomic development policies;
• developing a system to easily track in a timely fashion key socioeconomic variables for different socioeconomic groups.

Areas covered

• population profile;
• housing profile;
• access to education and health and population satisfaction index;
• employment;
• nutrition;
• etc.

Scope and sample

The scope is national and findings will be published by survey region and area of residence (urban/rural).

The sample size may total 20 000 households. (Depending on the size of the country)

7. Agricultural survey

Objective

Permanent agricultural surveys have the overarching objective of evaluating yearly agricultural production for the purpose of compiling agricultural accounts.

Areas covered

• profile of holdings and farmers;
• farmland, enterprise, productivity;
• livestock and poultry inventory, production and by-products;
• population involved in agriculture;
• farming practices, inputs, tools and equipment.

Scope and sample

The scope is national and findings are published by survey region.

8. Survey of modern companies

Objectives

The objective of the annual business survey (ABS) is to compile statistics on business undertakings, business diversity and development, factors of production used, economic performance and competitiveness in respect of investment and employment.

Areas covered

• inventory of businesses;
• jobs–wages;
• employment conditions;
• production.

Scope and sample

The scope is national and findings are published by major survey region. The sample size is dependent on the number of enterprises identified in the country.

[1] Administrative divisions differ from country to country. The region covered here represents the first level below the country. It is assumed that there are about a dozen regions per country.