Sudan Household Budget and Poverty Survey

closed

Proposed Development Objective: To support the Government of Sudan to collect quality data on key socio-economic indicators and produce provisional national-level poverty estimates to inform policy planning and monitoring.The Central Bureau of Statistics estimated that about US$5 million is needed to cover all household survey related activities (involving three rounds of data collection). US$2.2 million has been secured so far and will be used under the current project to implement the first phase of the survey. If no further funds are secured while this first phase is being implemented, the project would produce key socio-economic indicators at the national and rural/levels, and provisional poverty statistics at the national and rural/urban levels that could be used to provide an overall indication of the poverty incidence in the country. The two main limitations under this scenario are: 1) the inability to produce state-level indicators, which are critical for state-level policy planning and monitoring, and 2) the inability to properly account for seasonality effects on consumption and poverty. In order to address the second concern, data from the latest household survey will be used to quantify the expected level of potential under- or over-estimation of poverty rates due to seasonality. If more funds are secured on time, data collection would continue throughout the year through an Additional Financing, and official poverty statistics with state-level representation would be produced. The remainder of the project description is based on the current budget envelope.The project is structured around the following components:Component 1. Preparation and design phase This component includes confirming a few remaining methodological decisions on the survey design and finalizing the survey instruments. This includes the update of the sampling frame, the sampling design, the field-work design, the questionnaire design, and the interviewing method, together with the initial pretesting of the instruments. A number of consultants will be hired to support the various activities. This phase is expected to last until July 2021.Component 2. Survey Implementation phase. Training. CBS has traditionally implemented a centralized training of trainers followed-by state-level trainings. International experience suggests that decentralized trainings usually produce much higher variability and lower overall interviewer quality, but CBS’s experience with centralized trainings is not good. Nevertheless, a centralized training or regional-level trainings are being discussed. The training of interviewers is estimated to take 10 days of office/theory training, followed by a 5-day field practice to test survey instruments, field logistics, and quality monitoring protocols. The training is targeted to take place in July 2021.Fieldwork. Under current estimates, the first phase of the field work funded under this project is projected to take approximately 3 months and carried out by one team per state. This time includes the segmenting (if not done in office) and listing activities that teams will do before interviewing selected households in each location. Upon arrival to the specified location, teams are going to contact local authorities of the neighborhood or village to introduce themselves, introduce the survey, and ask for collaboration. The first round is currently scheduled to start around August-October (either middle of rainy season or start of winter season)..Component 3. Analysis phase / data processing and disseminationThe project will support basic data processing (cleaning and preparing the data for analysis), including the anonymization process before making it publicly available. The entire survey process will also be properly documented and archived and is expected to be released within 12 months of end of data collection. The team will look to secure additional funding to further support the data analysis and dissemination phase. This includes sampling weights (and attrition corrections if relevant), the production of a statistical abstract and a report, and dissemination workshops. Additional support will also be sought to support the development of a new poverty methodology and the estimation of provisional poverty numbers based on this data.