The official kick-off of Ehsaas Survey in KP, took place at Malakand today. Ehsaas is conducting a door to door survey all over the country so that data can be gathered about the socioeconomic status of households. This has become critical after COVID 19 since livelihoods of people and their socioeconomic status has been affected. Survey is being done through a computer assisted approach. Enumerators will be required to go door to door and collect information at the doorstep.
Malakand and Karak have been selected as sites where the survey will be conducted first. Since this is an end to end digital survey, training is critical. The Ehsaas survey is being conducted in close collaboration with the Provincial government of KP, Provincial Education Department of KP and the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics. Rather than our sourcing to NGOs, the survey is being done through the government system.
On Saturday, the week-long training of master trainers ended in Malakand. The training was conducted in Government High School No.1 Thana with the help of the District Administration. Following completion of the training, data collection was tested. Dr. Sania Nishtar together with her team inaugurated the roll out of survey in KP through a live demonstration of a survey sampling, done right there with a family residing in the vicinity of the school. Earlier on, she conducted an interactive session with master trainers and answered their queries. The survey that commenced today would be completed by December 31, 2020.
The master trainers would now head back to fields to further train the 1,000 supervisors and enumerators in KP for conducting the survey across the province. Door to door survey will be conducted across all districts of KP beginning with Malakand and Karak. An android-based tablet application designed for geotagged survey is being utilized to capture real-time household data for this purpose.
Interacting with master trainers at the venue, Dr. Nishtar apprised participants of the training about the design, methodology, key objectives and course of the survey. Speaking to the master trainers Dr. Sania Nishtar stated, "understanding of the master trainers, supervisors and enumerators about this new methodical approach, is critical for survey quality”. Adding further, she said, “The completion of this survey would lead to improved and rule- based targeting for multiple Ehsaas initiatives and programs aimed at uplifting the poor. Moreover, it will be converted into a live registry through a process of self-registration and the use of data analytics. The registry will be transparent and will have a well-defined updating procedure. It will form the database of One-Window Ehsaas and will be linked with all social protection initiatives so that benefits accruing to a specific household through multiple programs can be tracked.”
