How often should a growing settlement be resurveyed for caseload planning?

A registration sweep gives you a caseload number on the day it happens. In a settlement that isn't growing much, that number holds for a while. In one where shelters are going up every week, it starts drifting the moment the enumerators pack up their tablets and leave.

The honest answer to "how often should we resurvey" is that the interval should match how fast your shelter count is moving. A fixed calendar interval picked three donor cycles ago doesn't track that, and sticking to it anyway is how the gap between the count and the ground opens up.

What a resurvey interval is supposed to catch

A resurvey is meant to catch three things: new arrivals who haven't been through registration yet, shelters that have split or been abandoned, and footprint growth spilling past the boundary your sector planning assumed. Any of these can move your caseload estimate by a meaningful margin between counts.

If your settlement's growth rate is low, say the shelter count barely shifts month to month, a quarterly resurvey catches most of what matters and an annual one isn't unreasonable. If the growth rate is high, a quarterly interval means you're planning rations and NFI distributions against a number that's three or four months stale by the time the next count lands. In a camp adding shelters at a steady clip, that gap is often where the registration backlog starts.

Monthly vs quarterly monitoring: what changes

The difference between monthly and quarterly cadence comes down to whether you catch the slope of growth or just the two endpoints.

Quarterly counts tell you the camp grew from, say, 4,200 shelters to 4,650 over three months. That's useful for a trend line, but it tells you nothing about whether that growth was steady or whether 300 of those shelters appeared in a two-week surge after a border closure elsewhere. A monthly count catches that surge while it's still recent enough to action, rather than folding it into a quarterly average that smooths it out.

For ration allocation specifically, the cost of being wrong runs in one direction more than the other. Under-provisioning because your caseload estimate is stale means distribution lines that don't match what's on the ground, and a scramble to source additional rations on short notice. Over-provisioning because you're still planning against last quarter's number means a surplus that has to be explained in the next funding request. Neither is comfortable, and both get worse the longer the gap between counts.

A rough rule that holds up in practice: if your settlement's shelter count is moving by more than a few percent a month, move to monthly resurveys. If it's been flat for two or three consecutive quarters, you can likely step back to quarterly without losing much. The settlement's own growth curve should set the cadence, and that curve changes, so the right interval this year may not be the right one next year.

Where the registration gap shows up

The place this usually bites first is the footprint boundary, not just the shelter count. A camp that's gaining shelters is often also gaining ground, spreading into areas that weren't part of the original site plan. Ration distribution points, water trucking routes, and sector boundaries all get drawn against a footprint that was accurate when it was surveyed and increasingly approximate after that. A shelter count without a matching footprint-change map tells you the caseload moved but not where, which matters when you're deciding where to open a new distribution point versus stretch the existing one.

This is the gap that a monthly VHR pass over the camp is built to close: a dated shelter count and footprint boundary refreshed every month instead of carried forward from the last registration sweep, so the caseload number feeding your ration planning is never more than a few weeks old. Refugee Camp Mapping turns that monthly pass into a shelter-count layer and a footprint-change map you can drop straight into your planning cycle.

If your settlement's growth has been outrunning your registration schedule, it's worth seeing what a monthly count would have told you last quarter.