AReNA’s DHS-GIS Database

Advancing Research on Nutrition and Agriculture (AReNA) is a 6-year, multi-country project in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, being implemented from 2015 through 2020. The objective of AReNA is to close important knowledge gaps on the links between nutrition and agriculture, with a particular focus on conducting policy-relevant research at scale and crowding in more research on this issue by creating data sets and analytical tools that can benefit the broader research community. Much of the research on agriculture and nutrition is hindered by a lack of data, and many of the datasets that do contain both agriculture and nutrition information are often small in size and geographic scope. ARENA team constructed a large multi-level, multi-country dataset combining nutrition and nutrition-relevant information at the individual and household level from the Demographic Health Surveys (DHS) with a wide variety of geo-referenced data on agricultural production, agroecology, climate, demography, and infrastructure (GIS data). This dataset includes 60 countries, 184 demographic health surveys (DHS) surveys, and 122,473 clusters. Over one thousand geospatial variables are linked with DHS surveys. The entire dataset is organized into 13 individual files: DHS_distance, DHS_livestock, DHS_main, DHS_malaria, DHS NDVI, DHS_nightlight, DHS_pasture and climate (mean), DHS_rainfall, DHS_soil, DHS_SPAM, DHS_suit, DHS_temperature, and DHS_traveltime.