Household Surveys Shape Policy Investment
Household surveys are a powerful analytical tool that can shed light on how households interact with services and how interventions affect their wellbeing. Household surveys are therefore particularly relevant for policy analysis and guiding government investments. The Living Standards Measurement Survey (LSMS), housed within the Development Data Group of the World Bank, is one of the largest and longest-running household survey programs. To date, it has supported more than 100 LSMS-based national surveys. It has had a profound impact on many countries’ policies and investments. In Nicaragua, for example, national-level LSMS data were used to improve the targeting of social programs associated with the Emergency Social Investment Fund. This resulted in the government diverting funds away from regressive sanitation projects and towards progressive education programs in extremely poor communities. While household survey programs have been critiqued for diverting limited national resources away from administrative data systems, they provide an important complement to these and other data sources by shedding light on the behavior and well-being of households to better target resources and services, particularly in environments where other data sources and tools may be weak or under-resourced.
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