supported household surveys should 1) allow for the creation of a comprehensive welfare aggregate to track poverty and shared prosperity, and 2) be multi-topic, building on the World Bank’s intellectual leadership in setting standards in multi-topic household survey design and implementation through the Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS) program.<sup>13</sup> These surveys are non-uniform across countries in terms of questionnaire design, sampling design, fieldwork organization, and approaches to data entry and processing. Understanding the local context, the institutional capacity for survey design, implementation and analysis, and the incentive structures for headquarters- and field-based survey staff are therefore crucial for formulating survey implementation budgets and understanding cross-country variation.

The first input into our database implementation unit cost estimates is a database of implementation unit costs that was compiled by the LSMS team on the basis of the detailed survey implementation budgets tied to selected surveys that are supported by the Living Standards Measurement Study – Integrated Surveys on Agriculture (LSMS-ISA) initiative in sub-Saharan Africa.<sup>14</sup> The detailed survey implementation budgets are sourced from 6 countries and are associated with the Ethiopia Socioeconomic Survey (ESS) 2011/12, Malawi Third Integrated Household Survey (IHS3) 2010/11, Niger Enquete Nationale sur les Conditions de Vie des Menages et l’Agriculture 2011, Nigeria General Household Survey (GHS) – Panel 2010/11, Tanzania National Panel Survey 2008/09, and Uganda National Panel Survey 2009/10.

Although these surveys are not used to estimate official poverty statistics, with the exception of Malawi IHS3 2010/11, they match the multi-topic household survey design criterion recommended by the World Bank Household Survey Strategy, and are integrated into the respective country NSSs. The specific LSMS-ISA supported survey waves that inform our analysis are the baseline for the respective panel survey programs; thus, their unit costs are applicable in the context of the cross-sectional household surveys that will be supported by the World Bank over

> 13 As recommended by the World Bank Household Survey Strategy, the questionnaire should cover relevant Classification of Individual Consumption According to Purpose (COICOP) categories with sufficient specificity and should elicit information on quantities of food items that are consumed (in addition to expenditures). In doing so, the surveys will continue to fulfill their traditional roles of providing vital inputs into constructing national accounts and the consumer price indexes.  Beyond the collection of consumption/income data, the multi-topic questionnaire should also cover an integrated range of topics including demographics; education; health; housing; wage, non-farm self-, and on-farm self-employment activities and income; non-labor income; asset ownership; food security; shocks and coping strategies; social protection; and child anthropometry (World Bank 2015b). For instance, in line with the data priorities articulated in the World Bank Gender Strategy, the recommendation is to gradually expand the scope of individual-level data collection and to collect data not only on education, health and employment, but also on ownership of and rights to physical and financial assets (World Bank 2015d). To the extent possible, the core modules for the collection of key indicators for the SDGs are recommended to be harmonized across countries, taking into account countries’ different starting points and capacity.

> 14 The LSMS-ISA is a household survey program that was established with a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to provide financial and technical support to governments in sub-Saharan Africa in the design and implementation of multi-topic, national, panel household surveys with a strong focus on agriculture. The program is implemented by the Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS) housed in the Survey Unit of the World Bank Development Data Group (www.worldbank.org/lsms).

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