Demographic and health surveillance of mobile pastoralists in Chad: integration of biometric fingerprint identification into a geographical information system

There is a pressing need for baseline demographic and health-related data to plan, implement and evaluate health interventions in developing countries, and to monitor progress towards international development goals. However, mobile pastoralists, i.e. people who depend on a livestock production system and follow their herds as the, V move, remain marginalized from rural development plans and interventions. The fact that mobile people are hard to reach and stay in contact with is a plausible reason why they are underrepresented in national censuses and/or alternative sequential sample survey systems. We present a proof-of-concept of monitoring highly mobile, pastoral people by recording demographic and health-related data from 9333 women and 2020 children mid establishing a biometric identification system (BIS) based oil the registration and identification of digital fingerprints. Although only 22 women, representing 2.4% of the total registered women, were encountered twice in the four survey rounds, the approach implemented is shown to he feasible. The MS described here is linked to a geographical information system to facilitate the creation of the first health and demographic surveillance system a mobile, pastoralist setting. Our ultimate goal is to implement and monitor interventions with the one health concept, thus integrating and improving human, animal and ecosystem health.