Introduction

In 2020, an estimated 936 million women of reproductive age were contraceptive users worldwide, of whom 65 million were living in sub-Saharan Africa (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. Population Division, 2020). In 2019, 38 million people were living with HIV worldwide, more than half of whom were living in East and Southern Africa (UNAIDS, n.d.). And in 2017, nearly 300,000 women died due to maternal causes; 94% of those deaths occurred in low- and lower-middle-income countries (UNFPA, World Health Organization, UNICEF, World Bank Group, the United Nations Population Division, 2019).

Ever wondered how these numbers are known, what data informed these estimates and others, and how these data were collected and why? Answering these questions requires an understanding of sexual and reproductive health (SRH) surveys, and this article provides an overview of that topic.

Surveys around the world, especially in low- and middle-income countries, have been and continue to be the primary source of data about individual-, community-, and population-level sexual and reproductive health. Beginning with the Knowledge, Attitudes, and Practices (KAP) surveys of the late 1950s, SRH surveys have been crucial tools for informing public health programming, healthcare delivery, public policy, and more. Most major demographic and health modeling and estimation efforts rely on data collected through surveys, and thousands of research studies have been conducted thanks to the data collected and made available through surveys.

For more than half a century, surveys have met major SRH information needs, especially in low- and middle-income countries. Even as the world has achieved impressive information technology advances, increasing by orders of magnitude the depth and breadth of data collected and analyzed, the necessity and importance of surveys have not waned. This article addresses three key topics:

While there are many types of SRH surveys, this overview focuses predominantly on the most ubiquitous type, population-based household surveys. To a limited degree, the article also discusses health facility-based surveys and other SRH surveys, such as school-based surveys. Attention centers on the Global South. To anchor the overview, the article begins with a bit of history.

History: Surveys Over the Decades

Knowledge, Attitudes, and Practices (KAP) surveys sprung from the field of demography in the 1950s, with a focus on understanding fertility intentions, attitudes toward family planning, and contraceptive practices of married women of reproductive age. Such surveys quickly expanded. By 1969, more than 400 KAP surveys had been conducted worldwide, many in low- and middle-income countries (Cleland, 1973). A major interest in the early days was understanding whether perceived hostility toward family planning services was a reality. Soon enough, data from KAPs accumulated showing that overt hostility to organized family planning services was a myth. KAP surveys proved that stereotypes—many of them overtly sexist, racist, and classist—about gendered, cultural, and religious opposition to family planning were simply wrong (Hill, 1968; Box 1). Thanks to the frequency of KAP surveys, some of which were longitudinal, researchers also began to measure the fluidity of fertility intentions around the world. Time and again, researchers found that at the individual level, fertility intentions were flexible and changed in response to life events and economic downturns. At the aggregate level, however, fertility intentions were far more stable, a result of “a series of canceling errors” at the individual level (Goldberg et al., 1959). In essence, the KAP surveys were measuring a stable population-level phenomenon that had limited applicability to individual-level outcomes (Mukherjee, 1975).

Thanks to the confluence of multiple factors—intensified concern of the coming “population bomb,” expanded availability to modern forms of contraception like the birth control pill, focused interest from newly established national family planning programs, and increased funding from new donors like the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)—interest in family planning data for programming, evaluation, and advocacy grew throughout the 1960s and 1970s. As data demands surged, especially for monitoring national trends and making international comparisons, the limitations of KAP surveys became more apparent. Calls grew louder for standardized, rigorous methodology, sampling, and questionnaire design (Cleland, 1973).

In 1971, the International Statistical Institute, USAID, and the United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA) joined together in identifying a common area of interest, the establishment of the World Fertility Survey (WFS). Funded from 1972 to 1984, the WFS provided technical assistance to 64 participating countries in their implementation of a standardized, population-based household survey designed to collect cross-nationally comparable data on population and family planning. Surveys generally included ever-married women ages 15–49, and samples ranged from 3,000 to 10,000 women in a country (International Statistical Institute, 1985). Collected survey data allowed for the measurement of total fertility, child mortality, contraceptive prevalence, fertility and contraceptive intentions, and more.

Meanwhile, in the mid-1970s, USAID brought another population-based household survey to the fore, the Contraceptive Prevalence Survey (CPS). Similar to the WFS, the CPS was designed to collect information on fertility, contraceptive use, and attitudes toward fertility and family planning. Unlike WFS, however, the primary goal of the CPS was to produce information for the management and evaluation of family planning programs using a much shorter questionnaire with the aim of producing results “soon after interviewing is complete, when they can have the most impact on program operations” (Anderson & Cleland, 1984). Though smaller in scope than the WFS, the CPS generally included all women of reproductive age regardless of marital status. The CPS was implemented from 1977 to 1985, and the CPS project (also known as the Family Planning/Maternal Child Health Surveys or Reproductive Health Surveys) was implemented from 1975 to 2011 (Morris, 2000).

With the end of the WFS in 1984, USAID launched the Demographic and Health Surveys Program (DHS) designed to provide technical assistance to partner countries to conduct high-quality, nationally representative health surveys that collected cross-nationally comparable data. The DHS Program took lessons learned from the WFS and CPS experiences to develop a robust survey program, including a rigorous methodology and sampling design, a standardized and tested core questionnaire, and a mandate to work with local institutions to strengthen local capacity. To date, the DHS Program has provided technical assistance to more than 400 surveys in 90 countries, making it the world’s largest and longest enduring national household survey program.

Like the CPS, the DHS Program generally provides data for all women of reproductive age. Today, nearly all surveys also include male respondents. In the early years of the DHS Program, the sample size of each survey was typically about 5,000 households. As a result of increasing demand for subnational-level estimates, the sample size of most DHS Program surveys has increased. For example, standard DHS implemented between 2007 and 2011 had a median sample size of 11,000 households, while those implemented between 2017 and 2021 had a median size of 15,000 households.¹ The decades have brought numerous other changes to the DHS Program in terms of survey scope and complexity (Short Fabic et al., 2012; Figure 1). New technologies have also changed survey implementation. By 2005, the DHS Program was experimenting with using computer-assisted personal interviewing (CAPI) in place of data entry using paper questionnaires. Nearly all DHS over the past decade have been conducted via tablet (e.g., CAPI) and this trend away from paper-based implementation is mirrored in other household and facility-based surveys.

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Figure 1. DHS adaptations over time. Blue font represents country-specific adaptation and black font represents DHS program-wide adaptation. Timeline was created by the authors using information from the DHS program’s survey characteristics search (ICF, n.d.).

Ten years after the establishment of the DHS Program, the United Nations established its own population-based household survey platform, UNICEF’s Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS), designed to respond to the World Summit for Children’s call to “measure progress towards an internationally agreed set of mid-decade goals” (UNICEF. Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys, Accessed on: March 11, 2022). The first round of MICS was conducted around 1995. By 2015, more than 280 MICS had been conducted in approximately 100 countries. The MICS have a number of similarities with the DHS, but differentiate themselves by their focus on children. For example, MICS include questions designed to measure early-child development, learning, and child labor. Unlike DHS, MICS have not measured adult mortality or collected health-related biomarkers.

More recently, in the mid-2010s, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) established their own respective household survey programs. PEPFAR’s Population-Based HIV Impact Assessments (PHIA) focus on HIV behaviors and outcomes, including HIV incidence, in 15 PEPFAR-supported countries (ICAP, n.d.). Meanwhile, BMGF’s Performance Monitoring for Action (PMA) surveys (formerly known as Performance Monitoring and Accountability 2020 surveys) initially focused on family planning attitudes and practices in 11 countries in the Global South who had made commitments to the Family Planning 2020 agenda (Johns Hopkins University, n.d.-a). Akin to the CPS of years past, PMA prioritizes collecting a limited set of key family planning data meant to quickly provide information to drive programming. Such data are also intended for monitoring progress toward achieving national goals set through the Family Planning 2020 initiative (FP, 2020).

These four platforms—DHS, MICS, PHIA, and PMA—represent the current major SRH-focused household surveys in low- and middle-income countries that are internationally comparable. Among these platforms, DHS collects the widest range of data on population, health, and nutrition, followed by MICS. PHIA collects the most HIV-related data. And PMA’s family planning data are collected with the most frequency.

Of course, many countries have their own national SRH-focused surveys that are not designed to be internationally comparable (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs Population Division, 2021). For example, China’s One-per-Thousand Population Fertility Sample Survey of 1982 long held the record for being the world’s largest sample survey (State Family Planning Commission, n.d.) and set the stage for many SRH surveys China subsequently implemented. Additionally, in the 1990s, the League of Arab States led the Pan Arab Project for Child Development (PAPCHILD) survey program to collect information on reproductive and child health in nine countries in the Middle East and North Africa (Anonymous, 1994a, 1994b, 1995; Global Health Data Exchange, n.d.).

Myriad SRH-related research and evaluation surveys are underway around the world, including the Global Early Adolescent Study, which “seeks to better understand how gender socialization in early adolescence occurs around the world, and how it shapes health and wellness for individuals and their communities” (Johns Hopkins University and World Health Organization, n.d.). There are also several large-scale, nationally representative school-based and facility-based surveys that measure SRH. For example, the World Health Organization and U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Global School-Based Student Health Survey (GSHS) collects data from school-based adolescents ages 13–17 on a range of issues, including sexual behaviors that contribute to HIV, other sexually transmitted infections, and unintended pregnancy (World Health Organization and U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, n.d.). Begun in 2003 and implemented in more than 100 countries, the GSHS builds from lessons and methods developed in the United States through decades of adolescent school-based research studies (Brener et al., 2013). When it comes to facility-based SRH surveys, the DHS Program’s Service Provision Assessment (SPA) and World Health Organization’s Service Availability and Readiness Assessment (SARA), which evolved in 2021 to become the Harmonized Health Facility Assessment (HHFA), are the two most widely used standardized surveys measuring indicators related to SRH service delivery (World Health Organization, n.d.). For ease of reference, this article refers to the HHFA as its predecessor, SARA.

The SPA began in 1997 and the SARA began in 2010, having evolved from the Service Availability Mapping tool that WHO developed in 2004. The SPA is a nationally representative survey of formal health facilities that provides a comprehensive, cross-sectional overview of availability of services, capacity to provide quality services, and quality of services and care provided to clients. Meanwhile, the SARA provides data on availability of services and capacity to provide quality services; its questions are harmonized with a subset of the SPA. Both SPA and SARA evolved from the Population Council’s Situation Analysis (SA) studies, which began in 1989 with a focus on family planning and reproductive health services. SAs were motivated, at least in part, by DHS findings, which indicated that supply-side weaknesses were important drivers of low contraceptive prevalence (Lindelow & Wagstaff, 2013). Based on ongoing supply-side questions, USAID introduced SPAs with the aim to expand data collection to explore a broader set of service delivery issues and health areas, including and especially child health. Both SPAs and SARAs are implemented in a variety of low- and middle-income countries, though SARAs are far more widespread. The PMA surveys also include a facility component where health facilities, pharmacies, and retail outlets providing contraception in the sample catchment areas are surveyed in order to understand service availability and client satisfaction.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, and specifically developed in the context of the pandemic, the World Health Organization began implementing health facility assessments through telephone interviews in order to understand continuity of health services, including SRH services (World Health Organization, 2020). Such surveys are much faster and far less expensive than in-person surveys that require a facility visit. However, they are also far less comprehensive and more prone to biases. At the household level during the pandemic, the PMA surveys and MICS began implementing computer-assisted telephone interview (CATI) surveys (i.e., telephone interview with data entry using applications on tablets or phones). PMA’s surveys span four focal countries to understand COVID-related knowledge, attitudes, and practices, as well as the impact of the pandemic on contraceptive access and use (PMA, 2021). The new MICS Pulse surveys are implemented in three countries and assess a range of issues, from children’s nutritional status to COVID risk perception (UNICEF, n.d.-a). While CATI surveys are not new—some KAP surveys of even the 1950s were phone-based—their widespread application in response to the pandemic may offer another avenue of accepted and supported SRH data collection well beyond the COVID crisis.

Current Methodological Strengths and Limitations

As the history of sexual and reproductive health (SRH) surveys illustrates, during the 1950s and 1960s, fertility and family planning knowledge gaps drove the development and implementation of health surveys in high- and low-income countries alike. Over the intervening years, surveys in low- and middle-income countries had to take on the added mandate of providing fertility, mortality, and other indicator estimates due to ongoing weaknesses in civil and vital registration systems and inadequate routine health information management systems. This reliance on household surveys for key fertility and mortality estimates, coupled with increasing demands for more health-related data, have kept many surveys especially long and complex (Table 1). Today, key household surveys collect data to measure a wide range of SRH indicators—from contraceptive prevalence to HIV prevalence, from cervical cancer screening rates to skilled birth delivery rates, from age at menarche to age at first sex, and more. All four major surveys make their data publicly accessible in standardized form ready for analysis in common statistical software.

To ensure that the collected data are nationally and subnationally representative, all major household survey programs use a stratified multistage sampling strategy. Key sample size determinations are made based on data needs, including desired precision of estimates and administrative levels of interest, which determine the number of sampling strata. Thereafter, census enumeration areas are randomly selected proportional to population size. The survey team (generally the National Statistics Institute) conducts a household mapping and listing exercise to identify all residential structures in the selected enumeration areas. After the mapping and listing exercise, households within the selected enumeration areas are randomly selected for inclusion. Survey implementation begins and interview teams visit selected households. After interviewers receive informed consent, they implement the household questionnaire to identify all household members eligible for the individual questionnaire and to collect key household background data.

In order to collect data that are comparable across countries and over time, standard core questionnaires are used alongside survey manuals that describe the rationale for inclusion of certain questions or sections. The survey manuals generally include topics such as sampling, field staff training, interview procedures, and quality control, ensuring that similar questionnaire and survey procedures are followed in each country. Survey questionnaires can be tailored to meet local data needs by adding or deleting questions based on relevance to a particular country context. To accommodate requests for information on special topics and to achieve some level of comparability, the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS), and Multiple-Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) to a more limited degree, offer optional questionnaire modules on a series of topics. Additionally, to meet the need for prevalence data on myriad health conditions, including HIV, anemia, malaria, and more, DHS also frequently makes use of biomarker testing. Every Population-Based HIV Impact Assessment (PHIA) also includes complex HIV-related biomarker testing. While these approaches have enabled the large survey platforms to meet data needs for multiple program areas, they have the potential disadvantage of leading to lengthy questionnaires and complex biomarker collection and testing approaches that are daunting for respondents and interviewers alike. To date, there has been no solid evidence that respondent or interviewer fatigue negatively affects data quality; however, as questionnaires lengthen, this possibility is of increasing concern.

To counter this concern, surveys have explored different methodological approaches to reduce respondent and interviewer burden. For example, due to its wide scope, the 2017 Benin DHS included a split-sample design where half of households were eligible for women’s height and weight measurements, anemia testing, malaria testing, and domestic violence questions, and the other half of households were eligible for noncommunicable disease questions, blood pressure measurements, and men’s interviews (Institut National de la Statistique et de l’Analyse Économique INSAE and ICF, 2019). Another approach DHS has explored is the continuous survey, which both Peru and Senegal have implemented. The continuous DHS is implemented on an ongoing basis. In Senegal, specific data elements are collected at alternating intervals in order to reduce the burden on respondents and interviewers. The approach is also designed to strengthen local institutional capacity and provide more regular and frequent data for program monitoring. Both Peru and Senegal have had major successes in their continuous approaches; however, neither has been successful at constraining survey expansion, including sample size expansion (Becker et al., 2019). Performance Monitoring for Action (PMA) has taken a different approach: Surveys on non-SRH topics (such as nutrition and schistosomiasis) have been conducted between the annual family planning surveys using independently sampled households within the same enumeration areas (Johns Hopkins University, n.d.-b).

These experiences, coupled with the historic experience of the Contraceptive Prevalence Survey (CPS), which started relatively lean in scope and ended quite sizable, highlight the reality that when stakeholders have the opportunity to collect data, they use that opportunity to collect as much as is possible, in the process expanding both survey content and sample size. This reality creates major challenges to both budgeting and implementation. Increasing survey costs and complexity threaten survey implementation and quality.

In the context of SRH data, the expansion of survey size and scope has advantages and disadvantages. First, such expansion allows for more complex and nuanced analyses, including analyses that highlight the interconnected nature of SRH with other elements of individual, community, and national-level health, education, environment, and wealth. Second, sample size growth can allow for more granular estimates at subregional levels and can improve precision of indicators estimated in a survey and model-based estimates using survey data. For example, the DHS Program offers spatial models for a range of key indicators, allowing users to identify geographic variation in SRH behaviors and outcomes and geographies that would likely benefit from increased programmatic focus (Burgert-Brucker et al., 2018). On the flip side, expansion of survey size and scope can limit data collection opportunities. The increased cost associated with increased survey complexity means that funding negotiations in low- and middle-income countries between partner governments and donors can be protracted, leading to survey delays. Second, the expansion in survey scope typically benefits the broader health space rather than SRH data collection directly; that is, as questionnaire space is increasingly occupied by non-SRH topics, the “real estate” for SRH questions is either unchanged or diminished. For example, the DHS Program’s core questionnaire has fewer family planning-specific questions today than it did in the mid-1990s (Fabic & Choi, 2015).

Cross-sectional household surveys are rich sources of data, but as with other surveys, they also have numerous data quality issues. As exemplified in Box 2, selection bias, recall bias, social desirability bias, interviewer bias, and misclassification bias and error can represent major concerns. With most SRH surveys in low- and middle-income countries having very high response rates, nonresponse bias is less of a concern, though it too can negatively impact survey representativeness. These biases can be reduced through a variety of efforts, including effective survey and questionnaire design, extensive interviewer training and supervision, integrated use of technologies like computer-assisted self-interviewing for sensitive questions, and analytic techniques to incorporate various effects into research study design.

Turning to facility-based surveys, the Service Provision Assessment (SPA) consists of four survey instruments, which are adapted to local context—the facility inventory, provider questionnaire, observation protocol, and exit interview questionnaire. The facility inventory includes the core World Health Organization’s Service Availability and Readiness Assessment (SARA) questionnaire and is used to assess facilities’ capacity to provide basic services. Meanwhile, the provider interview questionnaire is used to assess human resources, the observation protocol is used to assess provider adherence to provision of care standards, and the exit interview questionnaire is used to assess client satisfaction and experience. The four instruments together provide comprehensive data on service availability and quality of care.

The sampling design of facility-based surveys generally depends on three factors: the level and type of disaggregation required, the type of health services to be assessed, and the level of precision desired. One of the main challenges to sample design is the difficulty of getting a good quality sampling frame: the number, location, and type of health facilities in a country. Such information is required to ensure a representative sample. Many countries, however, do not keep this information accessible or up to date. Recognizing this limitation, a number of low- and middle-income countries over the past decade have increased investment in developing and maintaining master facility lists. Such lists generally include all public healthcare facilities in a country and some lists also include private facilities (World Health Organization, 2017).

When it comes to data collection and use, facility surveys offer unique insight into SRH quality of care. While household surveys or routine health management information systems collect information on what services were provided or received, only facility-based surveys collect comprehensive information on the quality of those services. For example, a 2018 analysis of SPA data across 10 low- and middle-income countries offered empirical evidence that at the primary level, quality of care for sick-child care, family planning, and antenatal care was low in all study countries; postnatal family planning counseling was especially poor (Macarayan et al., 2018). Another example can be found in the 2018–2019 Afghanistan SPA (Ministry of Public Health/Afghanistan and ICF, 2019), which provided evidence to better answer a major question raised from the 2015 Afghanistan DHS (Central Statistics Organization (CSO), Ministry of Public Health (MoPH), and ICF, 2017): Despite increased investment, why didn’t maternal mortality improve in recent years?

The Afghanistan SPA showed that only 15% of all first-visit antenatal care clients were assessed for all four key client history factors, only one in four women reported that the provider counseled them on pregnancy risk factors, and only 35% of facilities offering normal delivery services performed all seven emergency obstetric and neonatal care (EmONC) functions (Ministry of Public Health/Afghanistan and ICF, 2019). The SPA also found huge differences in EmONC between public and private facilities, with 80% of public facilities offering comprehensive EmONC compared with only 13% of private facilities. These and other data on service availability and quality allowed program managers and policymakers to identify service provision weaknesses that need to be addressed in order to improve maternal health outcomes in Afghanistan. In essence, the DHS helped to identify the problem (health outcome)—here, high levels of maternal mortality—while the SPA helped to identify the cause (health outputs)—here, limited availability of comprehensive and good-quality maternal healthcare services.

Although quality of care measurement is a major benefit of facility-based surveys, it is also a major stumbling block. First, there is no common definition of quality or global set of key indicators of quality. Without such definition and agreement on key indicators, the ability of international SRH-focused facility survey programs to garner sufficient interest and funding for widespread implementation remains more notional than reality. Second, survey teams are limited by time and sample size in their ability to adequately capture quality of care data for direct observation of key SRH-related events such as labor and delivery; this limits the utility of facility-based surveys to measure quality of care of certain SRH cases that present to health facilities relatively infrequently (e.g., management of obstetric complications). To measure provider knowledge and competencies for managing such cases, clinical vignettes have been used (Ministry of Health and Population/Malawi, 2019), but the interpretation of results is challenging as it must take into consideration the “know-do” gap (Mohanan et al., 2015). Third, observation and client exit interviews often offer conflicting estimates. For example, an analysis of data from five SPAs found that data collected through client exit interviews systematically overestimated counseling on contraceptive side effects as compared with direct observation, a discrepancy indicative of courtesy bias (Choi, 2018). Similarly, an analysis of self-reported client satisfaction comparing estimates derived from facility-based surveys to those derived from household surveys also found systematically higher levels of satisfaction reported at the facility level, indicating potential courtesy bias in facility-based surveys (Glick, 2007). These findings highlight the importance of robust questionnaire design and interviewer training to minimize courtesy bias, especially since client exit interview data remain invaluable for understanding and improving client-centered care (Giessler et al., 2021; Holt et al., 2019; Srivastava et al., 2017).

Finally, although most health facility surveys’ primary purpose is monitoring service readiness and quality of care, there is strong interest in using population-based and health facility surveys jointly in order to understand the impact of the service environment on service use and even health outcomes at the population level. However, methodological limitations for linking two sample surveys present another set of analytic challenges (Skiles et al., 2013), and even when the linkage is possible, as in PMA (Choi et al., 2019), analytical challenges remain for a variety of reasons, including temporality of data collection and potentially flawed assumptions about geographic proximity and service utilization (Peters et al., 2020). Taken together, these challenges limit the ability to draw conclusions about the relationship between service availability, service quality, and service utilization.

These challenges also represent ongoing opportunities for methodological and theoretical grounding of key public health and healthcare measurement, which can and should drive survey refinement and, where needed, survey development.

Challenges, Opportunities, and Directions for the Future

Additional Opportunities for Capacity Strengthening

Even if such perceived challenges never materialize, the proliferation of data does not ensure its widespread use. SRH survey programs need to facilitate effective interpretation and use of the data they collect in order to encourage evidence-informed decision making. Technological advances make virtual learning opportunities more readily accessible to key stakeholders worldwide, and open-source tools make data visualization and presentation all the easier to create and all the more visually striking. Advances in data visualization approaches have also expanded opportunities to convey SRH survey findings. Recent use of chord and Sankey diagrams, for example, have provided visualizations to help program managers better understand the dynamics of contraceptive switching and discontinuation (Choi, 2019; Finnegan et al., 2019; iSquared, 2019; Population Reference Bureau, 2019; Figure 2).

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Figure 2. Sankey diagram to visualize 12-month contraceptive continuation, switching, and discontinuation, Ethiopia (2016). DHS source: Interactive Visualization of Contraceptive Dynamics: Twelve-month discontinuation rates from Demographic and Health Surveys (iSquared, 2019).

Capacity strengthening for data use has expanded analytic opportunities and increased data use, but the need for further strengthening continues, especially as increasingly available and accessible survey data and nonsurvey data (i.e., health information and management systems data, nontraditional data such as big data from other sectors) allow for increasingly innovative analyses. Data use, however, is but one of many areas of capacity strengthening SRH survey programs must continue to support. Capacity strengthening is also a thorny area, since technical assistance has been a component of survey programs since at least the early 1980s. Has capacity been strengthened? Is technical assistance still required?

The answer is yes, capacity has been strengthened and yes, technical assistance in many low- and middle-income countries is still invited and welcomed. Over the years, however, the types of capacity needs have changed, as have the approaches. For example, the initial focus of the DHS Program’s capacity-strengthening approach was individual-level, on-the-job training coupled with material support for implementing organizations. Over the years, the Program added other types of activities such as postdoctoral training, short-term fellowships, and faculty fellowships to support individual development and expand DHS data use (Wang et al., 2021). The Program developed e-learning courses, codification of the DHS curriculum, and even a Key Indicators Survey as a “do-it-yourself” survey package to facilitate widespread collection, analysis, and use of household health survey data. Since the 2010s, attention has focused on capacity strengthening of institutions rather than individuals, as guided by rigorous capacity assessments for identifying organizational needs, directing limited resources, and monitoring change. In 2021, most countries can plan and implement effective and good-quality SRH surveys, but assistance is still required for several key areas, such as sampling design, data processing, and sample weighting. It should be expected that as long as “international development” is a field, technical assistance for various survey processes will continue.

Conclusion

The sexual and reproductive health (SRH) field has been a global leader in survey development and implementation from its earliest advances in the 1950s. In low- and middle-income countries, SRH-specific surveys of early years have expanded into broad, multitopic surveys and this trend is expected to continue. At the risk of stating a cliché, an abundance of public health data collection, modeling, and research rests on the shoulders of the SRH field, including, and especially, the field of family planning. These data have been transformed into information, which has supported public health and heath care advocacy, budgeting, policies, and programming worldwide (Nolan et al., 2017).

Importantly, SRH and broader public health knowledge derived from surveys is only made possible thanks to the openness and willingness of the millions of individuals who have participated in these surveys, answering in-depth, personal, probing questions about their lives and lived experiences. Each of the respondents is owed a debt of gratitude. Deep appreciation also belongs to the collective—the committed communities of experts, funders, implementers, and advocates who over eight decades have made SRH surveys a force for good. Thanks to the hard work of the collective and the willingness and openness of individual participants, one can precisely estimate how many contraceptive users are in the world, how many people are living with HIV, and how many mothers died due to maternal complications, among other data. One can identify public health and healthcare problems, identify communities in need, monitor and evaluate the impact of public health work, and ultimately drive better resource, programming, and policy decisions.

As this article illustrates, SRH surveys in low- and middle-income countries are complex, imperfect, and durable. They have also proven to be invaluable sources of knowledge historically, in the present-day, and for the foreseeable future.