Millenium development goals (MDG) database

The Millennium Development Goals (MDG) project aims at re-disseminating national statistical figures on MDG indicators already published at the national level. The project is a cooperation between Statistics Norway (SN) and seven of our partner countries. This document covers metadata for the data from Malawi.

The international data was collected from the UN MDG database, while the national data was collected from national Statistics Office (NSO) in Malawi. The cooperation on data collection was initiated by SN and NSO in Zomba in May 2009, and continued through the following two years. The data collection was regulated by an agreement between NSO and SN. There will be annual updates of the data.

Different international institutions are responsible for delivering data on different data to the UN MDG database; the institutions and what indicators they are responsible for are documented in the chapter on collecting MDG data. The chapter also includes the sources of the national data.

The report presents metadata on all the indicators. Included here are the definitions (the indicators are defined by UN), how the international data are obtained on the specific indicators, the common statistical instruments and specifications on the national sources. The last part also includes relevant deviations from the definitions, and identifies additional information that is available through reanalysing raw data from earlier surveys.