The DHS Program

Now available — connect your AI assistant directly to DHS statistics

Ever wish you could simply ask an AI assistant a question about DHS statistics and get a real, sourced answer back? Need to compare key indicators across countries without writing a line of code? The DHS Program MCP server lets assistants such as Claude and ChatGPT connect directly to The DHS Program API — drawing on the same authoritative source that powers STATcompiler and the DHS Mobile App. 

What is an MCP?

MCP stands for Model Context Protocol — an open standard that gives AI assistants a safe, structured way to consult an outside source of information. Think of it as a reliable reference desk: instead of guessing, the assistant looks up your answer through clearly defined, read-only tools and reports back what it finds. If you can ask a question in plain language, you can use it.

Watch: Setting up the MCP Server

Watch a short walkthrough of connecting the MCP server — adding it to your assistant, confirming the connection, and asking your first question about DHS statistics. 

What You Can Do 

Rates percentages, trends — visualized and described

Explore the full indicator catalog. Search The DHS Program's full set of indicators in plain language, then retrieve the real published values for the countries, surveys, and years you are interested in. These are the same published figures available through the API. 

Compare Indicators. Compare an indicator across countries or over time, and break results down by education, wealth, residence, subnational region, and other background characteristics.

Browse surveys and publications. Look up survey types, fieldwork dates, sample sizes, and characteristics, and find the reports and publications tied to a country, survey, or topic.

Identify datasets and geography. Identify the survey microdata files available to registered users and discover the subnational boundaries that let DHS Program estimates be mapped to regions.

See It In Action

Want to know what using the DHS AI Assistant actually looks like? Here's a typical question from start to finish. The experience is the same whether you're working in Claude, ChatGPT, or any other MCP‑enabled assistant.

You ask, in plain language. Type a question the way you'd say it out loud — for example: "Please show a visualization of modern contraceptive use and fertility trends in Malawi." 

The assistant does the lookup. Behind the scenes, it identifies the right DHS indicators (modern contraceptive use among married women, and the total fertility rate), then queries The DHS Program API for every Malawi survey on record. Every tool it uses is read‑only, so it's only reading published statistics — nothing in the database is changed.

You get results you can trust. The assistant returns a chart alongside a short written summary, drawn directly from DHS statistics:

Across six DHS surveys between 1992 and 2024, modern contraceptive use among married women in Malawi rose from 7.4% to 66.4%, while the total fertility rate fell from 6.7 to 3.7 births per woman — a clear inverse trend over three decades. 

From there, you can keep going in the same conversation: ask about a single year, add another country to compare, break the numbers down by region or wealth quintile, or ask which surveys the figures came from.

Built to Be Current and Secure

The MCP server reads live from the API, so statistics stay up to date as new surveys and indicators are added. Every tool is read-only — AI assistants can look up and report DHS statistics, but cannot change, add to, or delete anything. Because every tool draws only on the API's pre-aggregated indicators, not the underlying survey microdata, no data access authorization is required.

Who Is This For?

Researchers, program managers, journalists, students, and anyone curious about population, health, and nutrition statistics — no query syntax required. For developers, it's a fast way to bring DHS statistics into AI-powered tools. 

For developers

Want to connect The DHS Program MCP yourself? These setup guides are aimed at developers and assume some technical comfort. If you're using Claude Code, follow our instructions for adding the MCP endpoint to Claude Code. For ChatGPT and other OpenAI clients, see our OpenAI setup instructions.

Usage 

For those using Claude for the first time, please be aware there is a limit when using a free account. Claude allows a certain amount of messages every five hours — once you reach that limit, you have to wait for the next five-hour window. Please refer to this article for more detail.

Questions or Comments? 

For inquiries about the MCP server, please contact api@dhsprogram.com.

The DHS Program is authorized to distribute, at no cost, unrestricted survey data files for legitimate academic research. Registration is required for access to data.