In 2006-07, Sistemas Integrales worked with the government of Iraq’s Central Organization for Statistics and Information Technology (COSIT) and in cooperation with the Kurdistan Regional Statistical Office (KRSO) to execute the country’s first fully national household survey in years.

An initiative of the World Bank, the Iraqi Household Socioeconomic Survey (IHSES), featured an array of design and implementation challenges related to the security situation there.

Sistemas Integrales helped COSIT achieve solutions that were both rigorous and feasible. For example:

• At times, fieldwork in a given district could become temporarily impossible. When such situations arose, the affected field team was reassigned to another area selected at random and would return to the first area later, once order had been restored.
• Another security problem was addressed by convening planning and development meetings outside of Iraq.

The 2006-07 IHSES results were used to establish poverty reduction initiatives at the governorate level and to reform the Saddam-era rationing system.

Additionally, in preparation for the next Iraqi household survey, Sistemas Integrales recommended an updated approach to data entry, with every interviewer entering his or her own data and transferring them to the central database on an ongoing basis. This would allow for continual real-time monitoring of data quality indicators, including nonresponse and missing data.