Afghanistan Mortality Survey 2010 - Measure DHS

• The Cluster Level Questionnaire was used to gather information from the head of the villageor some other knowledgeable informant, on access to basic amenities such as the presence ofa cell phone, a paved road, a police station or post.A.2 SAMPLING FRAMEThe sampling frame used for the AMS 2010 was the preparatory frame for the 2011 AfghanPopulation and Housing Census (APHC 2011), provided by the Central Statistical Organization (CSO).CSO has an electronic file consisting of 21,194 enumeration areas (EA) created for the APHC 2011. AnEA is a geographic area consisting of a convenient number of dwelling units which serves as countingunits for the census. In urban areas, an EA is a city block; in rural areas, an EA is either a village, or agroup of small adjacent villages, or a part of a large village. The frame file contains information about thelocation (region, district and control area), the type of residence (urban and rural), and the estimatednumber of residential households for each of the 21,194 EAs. Sketch maps are also available for each EAwhich delimit the geographic boundaries of the EA. Since this is a preparatory frame, the EA sizes arerough estimates and quite homogenous, with an average of 185 households per EA which is an adequatesize for a primary sampling unit (PSU) in a cluster survey.Administratively, Afghanistan is divided into 34 provinces; each province is subdivided intodistricts, with a total number of 398 districts nationwide. The 34 provinces are regrouped to form eightgeographical regions. Table A.1 shows the household distribution, the number of EAs by province and bytype of residence. Among the 21,194 EAs, 3,648 are in urban areas and 17,546 are in rural areas. Theaverage size of an EA by number of households is 230 households in an urban EA and 176 in a rural EA,with an overall average of 185 households per EA. In Afghanistan, 21.4 percent of the households residein urban areas, and 78.6 percent reside in rural areas. Among the 34 provinces, most of have a very smallurban part, and two of them (Nuristan and Panjsher) have no urban areas at all. The provinces are verydifferent in size; with the largest province (Kabul) representing 11.8 percent of the total households of thecountry, and the smallest province (Panjsher) representing only 0.4 percent. Table A.2 shows thedistribution of households by domain and type of residence. The domains have more or less equal size;with the smallest one, the North domain, representing 27.7 percent of the total households, and the largestone, the Central domain, representing 38 percent of the total households. The urban composition of thethree domains are vastly different, with 32.8 percent of the Central domain being urban compared to only9.7 percent of the South domain. The low proportion of the country that is urban required anoversampling in urban areas in order to produce reliable estimates for the urban area which is a studydomain for the AMS 2010.Some areas in the south of the country were considered difficult to access due to securityproblems, especially the rural areas of Kandahar, Hilmand and Zabul provinces. For security reasons, therural areas of these three provinces were excluded from the sample selection; however, the urban areas ofthese provinces were included in the sample selection. The excluded areas represent 8.8 percent of thetotal households of the country.146 | Appendix A