2024 health, nutrition and population study

What was surveyed

The 2024 Malawi Demographic and Health Survey (MDHS) treated Dzaleka as an additional national sampling domain rather than as a separate humanitarian survey. The National Statistical Office selected all 24 Dzaleka clusters in the design and then randomly selected 30 households in each cluster, producing a target of 720 households.

Of 691 occupied households, 681 completed the household interview, a response rate of 98.6 percent. Interviewers also completed individual interviews with 738 of 825 eligible women aged 15 to 49 and 330 of 407 eligible men aged 15 to 54. Data collection ran from 12 May to 31 August 2024.

Instruments and measurements

The survey used household, women’s, men’s and biomarker questionnaires. It collected information on dwelling conditions, water, sanitation, household composition, fertility, contraception, vaccination, nutrition, maternal care, malaria, employment, disability and violence. Biomarker work included anthropometry, anaemia tests, malaria rapid diagnostic tests and water-quality testing.

Using the same survey framework in Dzaleka and elsewhere in Malawi makes comparison more defensible than combining unrelated administrative datasets. The World Bank catalogue identifies Dzaleka as domain 33 and provides the survey metadata and data-access process for researchers.

What the comparison found

The report does not produce one overall ranking. Dzaleka recorded stronger results on some measures, including vaccination among children aged 12 to 23 months, four or more antenatal visits, birth registration and source-water quality. Other measures showed substantial gaps, including basic water service, employment among currently married adults, family-planning access, mosquito-net ownership and HPV vaccination.

The detailed records linked below preserve the relevant age group, reference period and comparison for each measure:

• household conditions, water, sanitation, registration, literacy and internet use;
• fertility, contraception and unmet family-planning need;
• childhood vaccination, nutrition and anaemia;
• antenatal care, delivery and malaria prevention;
• employment, disability and reported violence.

Limits on interpretation

These are weighted survey estimates, not a census and not live operational statistics. Some indicators apply only to narrowly defined groups, such as currently married women aged 15 to 49 or children in a particular age band. Results should not be generalized to every resident when the denominator is narrower.

The survey was cross-sectional. It can identify differences between the Dzaleka sample and the rest of Malawi, but it does not by itself establish why those differences exist. Sensitive topics such as violence are also based on disclosure in interviews and require cautious interpretation.

The report contains at least one internal discrepancy: its executive summary gives the national male-literacy comparison as 87 percent, while Figure 2.5 in the main text gives 83 percent. The detailed household entry identifies that inconsistency rather than silently choosing one number.