Measuring socio-economic patterns in a chronic conflict situation : Rapid assessments and a household survey in southern sudan created by Patrick D. Mullen

Measuring socioeconomic status in chronic conflict and post-conflict situations, such as southern Sudan, requires some creativity, due to the cost and complexity of population-representative household surveys of income and consumption, which are the usual sources of microeconomic data. One method is to use data on assets and living conditions from health and education surveys in order to estimate a relative index. While not common in chronic conflict situations, such a survey was carried out in southern Sudan in 1999. More timely information can be obtained in many cases from assessments using rapid-rural-appraisal (RRA) techniques. In southern Sudan, food security assessments using RRA methods are done yearly. Taking counties as the administrative unit of analysis, the present paper assesses the suitability of information from these assessments as indicators for socioeconomic status by making comparisons to a relative index of household socioeconomic status estimated from the 1999 health and education survey data. It assesses correlations between RRA estimates on various issues and the survey index, maps the different types of information and compares geographic patterns, and examines the distributions of health and education indicators across socioeconomic groups. A discussion of the findings leads the author to conclude that RRA assessments intended to be representative of larger populations can provide good indicators for aggregate patterns of socioeconomic status in a chronic or post-conflict situation provided larger groups are somewhat homogenous in terms of socioeconomic conditions, as seems to be the case in southern Sudan.