A UN-commissioned assessment of the DHS Program used Evidano to code 17 stakeholder interviews

For four decades, the DHS provided open, internationally comparable data on health, nutrition, and gender across more than 90 low- and middle-income countries and fed at least 39 SDG indicators. When USAID funding ended in February 2025, many countries were left with critical data gaps.

The UN Statistical Commission set up a Task Force on Sustainable Demographic and Health Statistics through Surveys, and the UN Statistics Division commissioned this assessment to inform how international support should be framed in future. The report was completed by an independent consultant under UNSD supervision.

The assessment was framed around the Task Force’s seven Shared Actions, from building national ownership to developing democratic data-sharing platforms.

In total, 27 people took part in 17 semi-structured interviews: staff from national statistical offices and ministries of health in DHS and non-DHS countries, international agencies, current and former DHS implementing staff, and DHS donors. A rapid desk review of literature since 2000 and three ISWGHS survey reports completed the evidence base.

Before analysis began, transcripts were checked against interview notes and video and audio recordings, both by hand and in Evidano.

A code list was developed deductively from the assessment protocol and extended with inductive codes and themes from the interviews. Evidano was used first to analyze the data by these codes and themes, and then again to re-analyze it by key question. The two sets of results were checked against each other for convergence.

Literature from the desk review and the survey reports was analyzed separately to triangulate the main themes from the interviews.

The DHS emerged as neither uniformly positive nor negative, but as a complex program whose impact varied with national engagement, institutional positioning, and time. Its collaborative design, standardized methods, and open data made substantial contributions.

The strengths also had costs. Large investment in the DHS expanded survey scope and cost and fostered dependence on periodic, externally supported surveys. Capacity strengthening often gave way to operational priorities, and key functions such as data processing and analysis largely stayed outside countries.

Countries that achieved self-sufficiency shared strong existing statistical capacity, consistent leadership, and a phased exit strategy. Non-DHS countries had legally autonomous statistical institutions, central coordination through national statistical offices, and domestic financing. The report also notes that the DHS had no independent whole-program evaluation since 2012.

The report ends with lessons learned for each Shared Action, covering national ownership, country support, standards, existing data, coordination, sustainable financing, and data-sharing platforms.

This case shows Evidano inside a high-stakes UN assessment with a built-in consistency check: the same interviews were analyzed by framework codes and again by key question, and the two passes were compared for convergence.

For evaluators working to tight timelines with senior stakeholders, it shows how framework-led deductive coding, inductive themes, and question-level re-analysis can be combined and triangulated against documents.

The report notes that the analysis period was too short to follow up with more interviewees or locate non-public documents mentioned in interviews, so some topics, such as democratic data-sharing platforms, did not reach saturation.

The 17 interviews reflect stakeholders selected by the Task Force, supplemented by snowball sampling, and are not a representative survey of all DHS countries.