Volume 55 - Article 6 | Pages 201–222  

A personal perspective on the history of the World Fertility Survey and The Demographic and Health Surveys Program: An interview with Tom Pullum

By Thomas Pullum, Sara Yeatman

Response Letter

21 August 2026 | Response Letter

The World Fertility Survey’s second lineage

by Tom Emery

Tom Pullum's account of the World Fertility Survey and the DHS is inspiring, insightful and invaluable. I write to add a branch of the same story, and to take up the question he leaves open at the end.

Pullum notes in passing that after the contract ended in 1984 an ISI Research Centre continued in The Hague, and that it never found stable funding but this is an incomplete ending to this branch of the story. The WFS was not only a programme for low- and middle-income countries. Around twenty further countries took part by contributing their own fertility surveys, including most OECD countries (Cleland, Scott, and Whitelegge 1987). When the funding moved to Maryland, those countries did not follow it. They consolidated around the UNECE in Geneva.

What followed was the Fertility and Family Surveys, coordinated by the UNECE through the 1990s (Festy and Prioux 2002), and this evolved in the early 2000s into the Generations and Gender Programme (Vikat et al. 2007). The GGP is funded today through European research infrastructure mechanisms rather than a development budget, and it is moving toward a permanent legal form known as European Research Infrastructure.

On this reading the DHS and the GGP are long lost siblings. The WFS is actually downloadable from the GGP's website to this day. The division between them was understandable in the 1980’s. Reproductive health and child survival were the urgent questions in the global south, and low fertility, partnership and gender equality in the global north. It was reinforced by two research communities that often operated in parallel. The United States participated in the FFS, whilst simultaneously developing and hosting the DHS.

The two have evolved very differently. The DHS did things the FFS/GGP never managed, operating at a scale and speed made possible by sustained funding from a single agency. The FFS and the GGP have been slower, thinner and often precarious, as data collection is funded locally and coordination requires the constant balancing of divergent interests across many countries. However it is now stronger than ever and institutionally grounded as an international scientific infrastructure.

Pullum writes that the DHS was a global good created and sustained by USAID, and that as far as he is concerned it could relocate anywhere now the United States has withdrawn its funding.

This brings the demographic community back to the original conversations it had in 1972, involving common standards and shared governance. How does humanity collect and process data on population developments at a global scale in the 21st century? With the retrenchment of USAID, demography is moving into a multipolar world. The answer to Pullman’s question could be informed by the experiences of DHS’ long lost sibling which has an established governance structure and track record of drawing investment in from many countries and aligning them in the interests of the demographic community as a whole. Such developments could bring the demographic community closer to the original partnership that the ISI, the IUSSP and UNFPA aspired to in undertaking the World Fertility Survey.

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