The Agincourt Health and Population Unit (AHPU) is an educational and research unit located within the School of Public Health at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. Since 1992, AHPU has been collecting information on birth, death and migration for all individuals identified as members of the approximately 11,700 households under surveillance in a rural sub-district in (what is now) Mpumalanga Province, South Africa. (For more information on the Agincourt Unit, see http://web.wits.ac.za/Academic/Health/PublicHealth/Agincourt/ .) The area is home to South Africans and Mozambicans, the latter group settling here legally during the civil war in Mozambique. Most Mozambicans here have permanent residency status which, according to the South African Constitutional Court, allows them access to government transfers. However, it is more difficult for Mozambicans to access government grants, largely because they lack the documents necessary to do so. In 2002 a study team collected data in Limpopo Province, at the Agincourt Demographic Surveillance Site, through the auspices of Philani Nutrition and Development Project. The work was funded by the National Institute on Aging under grant numbers R01 AG20275-01, P01 AG05842-14, and P30 AG024361. The project used this integrated health and economic survey in South Africa to investigate the links between health status and economic status. The survey instruments collected data on a range of traditional and non-traditional measures of well-being including income and consumption, measures of health status (including mental health), morbidity, crime, social connectedness, intra-household relationships, and direct hedonic measures of well-being. Random household selection was stratified by age-eligibility for Old Age Pension and nationality. In 2004 there was a second cross-sectional study conducted in Agincourt. A random selection of households was stratified on the basis of (a) citizenship, (South African or Mozambican),(b) and whether or not a death had occurred in the household.
