poverty_congo_fin.dta

README

This readme describes the Congo Household Consumption Survey database for poverty assessment, which was used to analyze the effect of university education on poverty using data from the Republic of Congo. The Republic of Congo is a Central African state, a poor middle-income country.

1 Scope of the investigation

The survey is aimed at ordinary households, and the social field comprises all households, all categories combined, Congolese or African living like Congolese households. Collective households living in camps, hospitals, prisons, etc., and households of international civil servants or members of the diplomatic corps living in the Congo are excluded from the social field. Geographically, the second Congolese Household Survey (ECOM 2) is a national operation that covers all twelve (12) departments in the country.

2 Survey Plan

The survey was conducted using a stratified random sampling design, with two stages, with proportional allocation in the first stage. In the first stage, enumeration areas (EAs) were selected. In the second stage, a constant number of households were selected according to the place of residence.

2.1 Sampling base

The ECOM 2 survey base comes from mapping the fourth General Population and Housing Census (RGPH2007) of Congo. This base includes 4,122 ZD for 726,728 households, of which 445,816 are in urban areas and 280,912 in rural areas.

2.2. Stratification of the survey field

The cities of Brazzaville and Pointe-Noire (treated as departments) and the 10 other departments are considered fields of study. In other words, the survey results must be significant at the level of the 12 departments. Furthermore, to compare the results with the 2005 ECOM, it seems important to make the survey results also significant at the level of the group consisting of the communes of Dolisie, Mossendjo, Nkayi, and Ouesso.

Except for Kouilou, Brazzaville, and Pointe-Noire, each of the other nine departments was subdivided into urban and rural strata. However, only the rural stratum was covered in the Kouilou department. The departments of Pointe-Noire and Brazzaville were divided into urban strata. In total, the geographical scope of the survey was divided into 21 strata, including 11 urban and 10 rural.

Concretely, apart from Brazzaville and Pointe-Noire, the four other communes are part of the localities that represent the urban environment of their respective departments (Niari, Bouenza, and Sangha). On the other hand, in the other departments, the urban environment is represented either by the chief town

of the department and/or other important agglomerations in terms of demographics and economy.

2.3 Updating the Survey Base

The update was the first field activity after the permanent technical team of ECOM 2, in collaboration with AFRISTAT experts, designed and adopted the technical documents. An ex-ante update of the cartographic base had already been carried out as part of preparing the QUIBB survey. It consisted of resizing the small or large ZDs.

It made it possible to:

• update administrative maps of districts and large urban areas;
• Resize the enumeration areas into relatively homogeneous sizes to be used for drawing the sample;
• Count households in urban and rural areas;
• draw up a directory of points of sale from which the price collection points were selected during the collection.

The next step was drawing the 1035 ZD and enumerating them to constitute the sampling frame of the secondary units. Two types of enumeration questionnaires were developed for this purpose. They were entered and cleared before the drawing of the households.

2.4 Sample size

The second Congolese household survey (ECOM 2) sample was estimated at 10,584 households spread over 1,035 ZD. The simultaneous increase in the number of primary and secondary units compared to ECOM 2005 makes it possible to improve the accuracy of the results.

The distribution of the household sample is presented in the table below.

Table 2: Distribution of the sample in number of households by department according to the place of residence

3 Sample drawing

In total, 21 sampling strata were defined. The sample was drawn stratum by stratum. The proposed sampling plan is a two-stage stratified area survey, with allocation proportional to the size of the EAs in the first stage. In the second stage, a constant number of households were drawn in each EA, to ensure self-weighting of the sample.

Drawing the sample in urban strata

In the first stage, 423 ZDs were selected in the urban strata. In the second stage, 12 households were selected in each ZD, for a total of 5076 households in urban areas.

Sample selection in rural strata

In the first stage, 612 ZDs were drawn in the rural strata. In the second stage, a constant number of 9 households were drawn in each selected ZD. In total, 5508 households were drawn in rural areas.

Precautions were taken, however, before drawing in each stratum.

In the cities, sorting the sample base file by district was first necessary using the serpentine method. This method involves ordering the districts according to their geographical zones by scanning the city from North to South and East to West. Then, by systematically randomly drawing the number of EAs to be selected, there was a strong chance that this sample would represent the entire city.

Similarly, in rural areas of each department, the sampling frame file was also initially sorted by district using the serpentine method. Then, the sample from the ZD was systematically drawn.

ORGANIZATION OF QUIBB

The QUIBB comprises two distinct main parts: the first deals with individual data relating to each household member, and the second deals with collective data relating to the household as an entity/collective.

4 Data collection

4.1 Collection Methodology

Generally, the survey was carried out using household interviews.

A survey wave was to last 18 days, during which each survey was to survey nine households. The workload of an interviewer is summarized in a table. In practice, the collection wave corresponds to 21 days. The remaining days (3 days) were used to complete the collection (1 day) and/or rest (2 days) for an interviewer who was not late. The collection duration was estimated at 84 days or approximately three months.

4.2 Organization of the Collection

Data was collected by teams consisting of a controller and three or four investigators. Each of them had to spend six (6) visits in each sample household, but the questionnaire for this QUIBB module was administered on the first visit (first day) in the household.