Conferences

In the last decades, many large-scale representative household surveys have been conducted in developing countries. In these surveys, for millions of individuals, demographic, socio-economic, health and other information has been gathered. At this moment, the data from these surveys cover over 100 countries in all regions of the developing world (Latin America, Caribbean, Sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa, South-East Europe, Middle East, South, Central and East Asia).

In the Database Developing World (DDW) these data sets are brought together, harmonized for a basic set of variables, and enriched with contextual data at the sub-national and national level. In this way, a unique window to the developing world is created that makes it possible to study important processes taking place there on a scale and with a degree of detail that has never been possible before.

The DDW is an open data infrastructure to which continuously new datasets are added. Currently it contains individual/household level data for over ten million individuals living in 1,200 sub-national regions within more than 100 developing countries. Because the information at the household level is supplemented with information about the sub-national and national context, the DDW offers unprecedented opportunities to study how processes at the household level depend on the context in which the households lives.

The major sources of the datasets included in the DDW are Demographic and Health Surveys, UNICEF Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys, Pan Arab Family Project (PAPFAM) surveys, ILO-IPEC SIMPOC Surveys, and census datasets from the IPUMS project. Most of the context variables at the sub-national level are derived by aggregating from the household surveys.

In my presentation I will discuss the content of the database, the way it is structured, the research, opportunities offered by it and demonstrate the possibilities by presenting the findings of a multilevel analysis of household and context determinants of educational participation in 90 developing countries.