Launch of the Socio-Demographic and Economic Survey in Samangan

Approximately 800 people will be hired to conduct the survey in Samangan including, surveyors, supervisors, data processors, and monitors.

Aybak, 24 February 2015 - The Central Statistics Organization (CSO) of Afghanistan with technical support of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) presented today the roll-out of the Socio-Demographic and Economic Survey (SDES) in Samangan.

The result of this survey will provide accurate data on the number of households, age and sex distribution of the population, as well as general information related to access to safe drinking water, education, literacy status, school enrolment, employment and child mortality. This data will be used for the future development and planning of the province.

Samangan is the seventh province conducting the SDES in Afghanistan after Bamiyan, Ghor, Daikundi, Kabul, Parwan and Kapisa.

Approximately 800 people will be hired to conduct the survey in Samangan including, surveyors, supervisors, data processors, and monitors. All staff hired will be from Samangan province in order to guarantee a fieldwork team familiar to the terrain, the people and the local culture specificities. The survey team will be supported by experts from CSO and UNFPA and the surveyor's work is scheduled to begin in mid-March.

At the end of the survey, data will be checked, coded, recorded into computers, summarized and analyzed before dissemination.

About SDES

In 2011, the Central Statistics Organization of Afghanistan began a historic survey of Bamiyan province with technical support from UNFPA and financial contributions from the Governments of Japan and Denmark. Intended to provide the local level data so desperately needed by both government and development and humanitarian programmes, the provincial-level SDES was an innovative means of addressing the population data gap left when the planned national census of 2008 was postponed indefinitely.

CSO intend to ensure that all provinces of Afghanistan have a complete and up-to-date SDES by 2018, so that future planning can be made on the basis of robust and technically sound data.

Completing the SDES in Bamiyan, Ghor, Daikundi, Kabul, Parwan and Kapisa required the collaborative efforts of thousands of trained field workers including 104 surveyors, and 1,372 cartographers and assistant cartographers.