ARK Researcher Tarana Ferdous presented a poster at 8th regional Public Health Conference 2017 organized by Bangladesh University of Health Science (BUHS) on 29th & 30th December, 2017. The poster topic was “Defining Household and understanding poverty in urban slums: A Qualitative study to inform household survey design in Nepal, Bangladesh and Vietnam.”
Nationally representative household surveys, such as DHS and MICS, are a vital source of information for the planning, monitoring and allocating resources across health and social sectors in low and middle income countries. With rapidly changing population dynamics and particularly, urbanization, many have questioned the appropriateness of these methods in capturing the needs of the urban poor. Main challenges of urban surveys are including as how to define a household, how to measure whether an area is a slum or not, and what are the characteristics of poverty in urban areas.
Therefore, in our survey we are exploring these issues in our pilot surveys and in our qualitative work with urban poor communities in Nepal, Vietnam and Bangladesh. We are part way through our data collection, so early findings from two communities in Kathmandu, Nepal and Dhaka, Bangladesh on the participatory methods were presented in the poster.
