Pacific Living Condition Survey

The overall goal of the Hybrid Survey (HS) project is to provide Vanuatu statistical systems with an affordable means and methodology to regularly collect statistics across key social and economic sectors, to derive indicators that would provide Vanuatu Government and their development partners with a core set of statistics to facilitate evidence-based policy development and planning, to monitor development progress and measure policy performance, and ultimately to describe development impact.

This core set of indicators provided by HS is related to health, education, nutrition, income and expenditure, culture, family planning, employment, assets of the household. More generally it is a poverty assessment of the situation in Vanuatu, based on a household survey. The questionnaire related to the survey is long, and for many reasons it has to be divided into different visits, at least 4. At each visit a specific module has to be completed.

More specifically, the objective of the survey is to:

• Collect current indicators on the situation of the household (description of the house, access to facilities, current level of education of each member)
• Collect indicators on past period, recall period (number of people sick during the last 3 months, number of cigarettes smoked during the past 7 days)
• Collect data about expenditure and income on recall period (expenditure on clothes during the past 3 months, income from wages during the past 12 months)
• Collect data about daily expenditure for 7 days (what did you buy today, goods or services, food and non food items bought)
• Collect data about daily food items harvested, gathered, or received from fishing, hunting or livestock activities, or received for free as a gift.

The HS project covers most of the topics required for the contemporary governments to report to the country decision makers on how the population lives, what their need are and what they want for their lives and their country. While other surveys have the same approach: HIES (Household Income and Expenditure Survey), STEPS (health assessment of the population in 3 steps), MICS (multi indicator cluster survey: situation of women and children), each of these cover specific domains but the HS is multi sectoral.