The Socio-Demographic and Economic Survey (SDES) is a historic initiative led by Afghanistan’s Central Statistics Organization (CSO), with technical support from the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and financial assistance of development partners. Over the past years, thousands of surveyors have fanned out across the country, going province by province to visit homes and collect detailed demographic data which will be used to create an unprecedented snapshot of the country’s demographic situation down to the village level.

It is well known that years of conflict and insecurity have led to large population movements across Afghanistan. Yet the nature of these movements, and how they have affected the demographics of individual villages or even provinces, has rarely been studied using accurate village-level data. This rigorous analysis of migration uses SDES data for six provinces (Bamiyan, Daykundi, Ghor, Kabul, Kapisa and Parwan) to fill this gap.