The main purpose of the survey was:

• To obtain information on a wide range of demographic health and socio-economic characteristics of the Matlab Surveillance Area and then to link it with the pre-existing information in the Matlab surveillance database in order to create a much enriched public use database.

The survey had a complex design and an extremely voluminous workload involving interviews of about 25,000 respondents, with four different samples—of household heads, of all household members older than 49 years, of all selected household members aged 15-49, and of mothers or caregivers of all selected children of 0-14 years of age. The interviewing took more than 3 hours on an average for a respondent.

The survey was undertaken under a contract with the icddr,b and was funded by RAND Corporation, USA.