Victoria Fan, a senior fellow in global health at the US-based Center for Global Development, agrees that increasing the frequency and granularity of data is important in order to make it more “policy relevant”.
However, she says there is a broader issue around the data systems that generate a country’s health estimates. She says attempts to track whether countries are building stronger data systems has not been prioritised by the global health community and funding agencies.
“We need better underlying data in order to improve the quality of these national estimates,” she said.
