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 they 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 933 women and 2020 children and establishing a biometric identification system (BIS) based on 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