A large body of survey data exists for SSA countries, much of it from household surveys. Much of this data is not yet fully accessible because of two main constraints. First, the data suffers from not being well documented and/or it has not been fully cleaned and edited. Second the policies in the country do not allow for full data disclosure and accessibility. In other words, some governments are not comfortable with allowing data to be used widely. In spite of these constraints, a large financial investment has been made in the collection and generation of these data sets as well as a human capital investment in terms of training, and experience. It is therefore imperative to find a way of increasing the further utilization of these data. It is suggested that an appropriate response to this problem is strengthening data storage and dissemination capabilities at the national level and to establish a central repository of data at regional and/or sub-regional level along with appropriate data management and dissemination capabilities.

The objective of the Africa Region Household Survey Data Bank (AHSDB) is to gather and organize household survey data sets to make them available for analysis. The challenges in reaching this objective are: the availability of data, the documentation of the data sets, the quality of the data and the conditions in the country to disseminate the data. The ultimate objective is to disseminate the data sets to users in SSA and elsewhere through various media types (hard copy, web page, etc.)

See the Africa Household Survey Databank section