Valid and reliable data is crucial for any policy planning process. In Malawi, the National Statistical Office (NSO) is the main government department responsible for the collection and dissemination of official statistics. With headquarters based in Zomba, its 300 employees conduct national surveys, such as the Demographic Health Surveys (DHS) or the Integrated Household Surveys (IHS), which form the quantitative data basis for much of the research conducted in Malawi.

IFPRI Malawi organized a five-day poverty mapping methods training with statisticians from the NSO. The training took place from 24 to 28 February 2020 at IFPRI Malawi’s office in Lilongwe. Nicholas Minot, Deputy Division Director of IFPRI’s Markets, Trade, and Institutions Division, and Jack Thunde, Research Analyst at IFPRI Malawi, conducted the training, which was attended by 14 statisticians (2 females and 12 males).

The main objective of the training was to equip NSO staff with the skills of generating highly disaggregated poverty maps by combining survey and census data using the small area estimation method. Using this method, poverty maps are generated in three stages. The first stage involves identifying household characteristics that are found in both the survey and the census data. These include education, asset ownership, and housing characteristics. The second stage uses the household characteristics from the survey data to describe the relationship between the per capita expenditure and the household characteristics in the survey data. The final stage applies the estimates obtained from the previous step to the selected household characteristics in the census data to predict per capita expenditure for each household, derive poverty estimates from the predicted expenditures. These estimates are then presented on maps.

NSO staff will apply their new skills to produce poverty maps for Malawi for the upcoming Atlas of Social Statistics using data from the Integrated Household Survey (IHS4) and the 2018 Population and Housing Census.

IFPRI Malawi will continue to support the capacity building of NSO staff with a geographical information system (GIS) training course, which is planned for the near future.

Please click here for the training program.

The article was originally published on IFPRI Malawi Page