Dear Severine Have you tried to get the information from local administration e.g chiefs , village elders, boma elders ? Also try and ask the agencies working in the area . They could be having information on that as Nutrition Anthropometric SMART surveys are usually conduct between May and August . Assuming there is no massive seasonal migration . Hope this helps

Thanks Rogers, I have been in touch with other actors in the area. We are doing this with the Kenyan Red Cross. We will collect that info from village elder etc if there is no other way but we don't have much time... Thanks again Severine

I think the field level would provide more information on this kind of data. Try talking to agencies working in Turkana. I am sure an organization like merlin working in Turkana central would have some info on population census but certainly may not be village level census. You might need to work with estimates

From Collins Lotuk: Hello Severine, Lots of survey have been conducted in Turkana and lots of humanitarian work there. Check with Oxfam and World vision on ground (Lodwar) for such kind of information. Also in most surveys conducted due to the vastness of the area sub-location has been used.You may also contact the National nutrition cluster for some of that information. All the best

Dear Severine, It might not be easy to obtain village level population data for survey use by yourself as ideally it requires a census. However, the data is readily available (I believe from the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics) which was compiled while the last population census was conducted in 2009/2010 in the entire country. However, obtaining the data is not an easy process, as it requires you to go through some procedures and authorizations (to obtain the primary/raw data)..... however, if you choose to use the sub-location data, this is readily avaiable for public consumption. But I do not know which is your sampling frame, plus am not an expert is deciding if sublocation data is okay in place of the village level pupulation data (for SMART surveys) Am sure we have experts in this field who can advise. Good luck. Regina

Hi what kind of survey do you plan to conduct?. if it is a survey to do with nutrition better contact the Division of Nutrition/Sector coordination for guidance on methodology and all the other information you may need including the validation process.Turkana level- kindly contact the nutrition partners ( WVI. Merlin,IRC)

The concern has been provided in this demographic information collection of survey planning . You can also also explain to local authorities the objectives of survey and then ask them to validate the village population data you will collect from agencies working the area (Turkana Central) by write up the village population their localities.

One issue with pastoralist populations (or populations with many pastoralists) is that there may be a lot of movement. This means that census data may be inaccurate and that village sizes can vary throughout the year. One approach is to use an alternative (i.e. to PPS) sampling scheme. I have used systematic spatial sampling (get a complete list of villages and sort this by county, district, location, and sub-location and then pick villages using a simple systematic sample. You will then need to estimate population size in each of the sampled villages on the date of the survey when you collect the survey data. This can be a simple roof count as the weighting need only be on relative sizes. The analysis is a little more complicated than with a PPS sample as you will need to account for the cluster design (as with any cluster design) and weight cluster-level data by village size (as you might with a stratified sample). I hope this is of some use.

in turkana central there are many humaniterian orgarnisation like oxfarm and irc but you check the lastest registration of persons by iebc i think they might have some data.you want to use.