Household survey encounters setback
Isaac Pinielo | Thursday March 24, 2016 12:08
Briefing journalists on Tuesday, deputy statistician general (STO), Dabilani Buthali said there are still some setbacks in the data collection process in the form of refusals, particularly in high-income neighbourhoods.
He said another significant problem encountered is the under-reporting of income, expenditure and consumption.
“For example, a household will report absolute poverty whereby they indicate that they do not have any income hence no expenditure and consumption when all indications show that the particular household is not as poor as it claims,” said Buthali.
He also indicated that households do not report consumption of food provided at work, adding that all households across the country are urged to support SB by allowing enumerators into their households and responding to the enquiry, providing the required information accurately.
z“While the problems are being addressed by SB fieldwork quality controllers, households are required to respond to questions during data and information collection,” Buthali stressed.
He noted that failure to provide the required information by households has far reaching negative effects to the quality of the indicators that will be produced at the end of the survey and hence inappropriate development of national programmes.
He assured households that confidentiality of all information provided is guaranteed, adding that any person employed to execute any duty under the Statistics Act of 2009 signs an Oath of Secrecy before a Commissioner of Oath.
According to Buthali, the BMTHS is a nationwide survey, and that all selected households, be it in cities, towns, villages, cattleposts, are urged to participate in accordance with the Statistics Act, which makes it mandatory for individuals to furnish the required information, and to answer questions during data collection.
He said having just discussed the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the survey comes handy to providing information that will enable the monitoring of goals and targets. Needless to say, this is just one among a series of surveys.
“Besides Botswana’s international obligations there are a variaety of uses of such data, nationally. Statistics Botswana conducts poverty and labour force surveys every five years,” he said.
This year, the labour force and the poverty (Botswana Core Welfare Indicators) surveys have been combined into what is called the BMTHS.
Buthali pointed out that the broad objective of the BMTHS is to provide a comprehensive set of indicators to monitor and evaluate progress on the National Strategies for Poverty Eradication, including the impact of programmes aimed at eradicating poverty, and to provide labour force information (employment, unemployment and labour force profiles) to aid government’s efforts in employment creation.
He said the data collection exercise includes interviewing and keeping of expenditure and consumption diaries by households.
“SB data collectors interview households through the use of questionnaires, as is normally done in surveys and censuses,” he said.
He added that the BMTHS data collectors ask questions mainly about demographic characteristics of the household, education, health, employment, income and expenditure.
He also said households are required to keep a diary of all the daily household expenditures and consumption.
He said the information obtained through the diary is used to come up with a basket of commodities to rebase the Consumer Price Index, and estimate household consumption and expenditure, used in the computation of the Poverty Datum Line (PDL) and Poverty Incidence.