National Panel Survey 2008-2009: Wave 1 (Tanzania)

Abstract

The NPS is nationally-representative household survey which provides measures of poverty, agricultural yields, and other key development indicators. The NPS is an “integrated” household survey, in that it covers a broad range of topics in the same questionnaire – from education and health to crime, gender-based violence and a range of other sections – to allow analysis of the links between sectors and the determinants of development outcomes.

The National Panel Survey (NPS) was designed to meet three principle objectives.

The first, overarching goals was to monitor progress toward the goals set out in the National Strategy for Growth and Poverty Reduction (aka, the MKUKUTA goals) and other national development objectives (MDG, PAF, etc.). The NPS provides high-quality, annual data on a long list of MKUKUTA indicators that is both nationally representative and comparable over time. As such, the NPS is intended to provide a key benchmark for tracking progress on poverty reduction and a wide range of other development indicators.

The second goal of the NPS is to facilitate better understanding of the determinants of poverty reduction in Tanzania. The NPS will enable detailed study of poverty dynamics at two levels. In addition to tracking the evolution of aggregate poverty numbers at the national level in years between Household Budget Surveys, the NPS will enable analysis of the micro-level determinants of poverty reduction at the household level. Panel data will provide the basis for analyzing the causal determinants of income growth, increasing or decreasing yields, improvements in educational achievement, and changes in the quality of public service provision over time by linking changes in these outcomes to household and community characteristics.

A third objective of the NPS is to provide data to evaluate the impact of specific policies and programs. With its national coverage and long time frame, the NPS will provide an ideal platform to conduct rigorous impact evaluations of government and non-government development initiatives. To achieve this goal, the National Bureau of Statistics will need to work in close collaboration with the relevant line ministries to link administrative data on relevant projects to changes in development outcomes measured in the survey.