The Egypt sub-national Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) was carried out in 2013-14 by El-Zanaty & Associates in collaboration with the Ministry of Health and Population. Financial and technical support was provided by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) Egypt Country Office, Middle East and North Africa Regional Office, and UNICEF Headquarters. The global Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) programme was developed by UNICEF in the 1990s as an international household survey programme to support countries in the collection of internationally comparable data on a wide range of indicators on the situation of children and women. MICS measures key indicators that allow countries to generate data for use in policies and programmes, and to monitor progress towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and other internationally agreed upon commitments. This MICS aims at providing data for monitoring system of the ‘Integrated Perinatal Health and Child Nutrition Programme’ (IPHN) implemented by the Ministry of Health and Population (MOHP) in Egypt with the support of UNICEF. The IPHN covers selected rural districts in 6 governorates, 4 in Upper Egypt and 2 in Lower Egypt. The MICS in the rural districts cover by the IPHN programme in Egypt was conducted as part of the fifth global round of MICS Surveys (MICS5). The IPHN programme is implemented by the Ministry of Health and Population (MoHP) in collaboration with UNICEF in selected disadvantaged rural areas of Upper and Lower Egypt. The survey has been specifically designed to respond to the data needs of the IPHN program and of its monitoring system (which adopts the model of the Monitoring Results for Equity System, developed by UNICEF). The specific focus of this MICS is on perinatal care. In the MoRES framework developed for the IPHN program, this survey complements the data provided by the routine administrative data collection system and by evidence provided by a qualitative study on perinatal care and nutrition. The IPHN programme has been initially conducted, since 2008, as a pilot in selected rural village/Family Health Units (FHUs) in 3 Upper Egypt governorates, and then – starting in 2012, it has been expanded in new FHUs in Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt, covering a total of 6 governorates at the time of the survey. A total of 2.5 million people were living in the areas of intervention at the time of the survey. Consistently with the focus of the survey on perinatal care, this household survey considered as eligible for the interviews ever-married women age 15-49 and children under five. A total of 7046 households were successfully interviewed with response rate of 99.9 percent. A total of 5847 ever-married women age 15-49 were successfully interviewed and 5090 questionnaires were completed for children under-5. The results of the survey are representative of the full area covered by the IPHN and for three subdomains, namely the pilots FHUs in Upper Egypt, the FHUs of Upper Egypt expansion phase, and the FHUs of the Lower Egypt expansion phase.
