SIGE Data Dictionary

The data dictionary of Haiti's education management information system: every variable the school census collects, with its code, label, type and length, and the conditional rules that govern when a field may be empty. At 196 pages it is the document that makes the enrolment and infrastructure series interpretable rather than merely quotable.

Its value is in the definitions that would otherwise be guessed. School status is not a single flag but a set of distinct cases, a new school not yet censused and not listed by the ministry, an old school not yet censused and not listed, and an old school already censused but not listed. Accessibility is likewise graded by the transport that reaches the school: difficult of access, reachable by public transport, only by four-wheel drive, only by motorcycle, or only on donkey-back. Water and sanitation variables separate the existence of a service from permission to drink the water and from access to handwashing, and toilet and latrine counts are conditioned to be empty when the corresponding service flag is false.

The dictionary also encodes the validation chain, which is what determines whether a figure can be trusted: respondent name, function, telephone and form date, then the zone inspector's name, telephone and certification date, then the district inspector's approval date, then the departmental planner's validation date. Teacher and director qualifications are recorded as separate holdings by institution and level, licence, diploma, certificate or attestation from the École Normale Supérieure or the École Normale d'Instituteurs, with an explicit code for no training at all.