Collaborating to ease Africa's data drought
Authors: None The Lancet Global Health
Journal: The Lancet Global Health (2017)

At the High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development in New York this week, UN Member States have been taking a detailed look at progress on a selection of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including goal 3 on ensuring healthy lives. As part of this process, 44 countries from across the wealth spectrum have provided voluntary national reviews, including seven from Africa. These African reviews reveal a dedication to the SDG process, with incorporation of targets into national plans and efforts to engage all stakeholders via consultations and awareness campaigns. However, there is a recurring theme when it comes to challenges. Aside from the obvious financial limitations, almost all countries cite a dearth of reliable disaggregated data on which to base intervention programmes. This data drought is the reason why so many burden of disease estimates for the continent remain just that—best guesses based on clever modelling or meta-analyses that stretch the bounds of statistical credulity by trying to combine heterogeneous small studies. The Lancet Global Health receives submissions of both types—the grand-but-uncertain and the small-but-real. There is usually a preponderance of high-income-country authors on one of these types of paper, and that type also seems to garner the vast majority of citations. It cannot be difficult to guess which is which. We try to publish a balance of both, but it would be refreshing to see more papers that combine reality with scale. Last month Osman Sankoh and Peter Byass reminded us of the invaluable work of the INDEPTH Network in this regard. INDEPTH brings together 42 health research centres that oversee health and demographic surveillance systems (HDSS) across Africa and the Asia-Pacific region. Its strategic plan for 2017–21 includes a commitment to the SDGs and to providing some of that sorely needed data on an ongoing and open basis via the network's INDEPTHStats site. Although data from HDSS are not randomly sampled from the population as a whole, and therefore cannot be said to be nationally representative, they are collected in a standardised way, have high statistical power, and offer a reliable insight into cause and effect by virtue of the homogeneous context. Their contribution to trend analysis is therefore extremely important. Other efforts should be highlighted and supported. INDEPTH is aligned with the Developing Excellence in Leadership, Training and Science (DELTAS) Africa programme—a US$100 million scheme to harness the knowledge of African research heavyweights such as Nelson Sewankambo and Alex Ezeh and to empower them to develop the next generation of researchers and leaders within a professional and collaborative environment. At the DELTAS Africa conference in Accra, Ghana, last week, grantees from 54 institutions in 21 countries showcased their innovative work on everything from multidrug-resistant tuberculosis to cancer. To judge from afar, the mood was upbeat and forward-looking. Addressing the injustice between the data gatherers and the grand number crunchers is the Uganda Medical Informatics Centre. As both an infrastructural project providing large-capacity servers and computational systems with which to store and process data, and a human capacity development project training up the next generation of medical informatics professionals, the centre's aims are to enable the integration, curation, and analysis of large-scale data within Africa itself. Speaking at the Planet Earth Institute's Spotlight Seminar in London, UK, last week, Centre Co-Director Manjinder Sandhu put forward the ultimate goal of moving beyond grant funding and towards a self-sustaining model whereby the centre sells its services to governments. The centre is only 2 years old, and still has some way to go in terms of working out issues of patient privacy and data governance, but is nevertheless an inspirational project that should be held up as an example of the sort of big thinking necessary for Africa's future research needs. The conceptual threads running through all of these highly encouraging programmes are ones of openness, interdisciplinarity, and sustainability. In Accra last week, DELTAS Africa's programme manager, Alphonsus Neba, said “Collaboration is key to optimising our limited resources to solve our common challenges”. We could not agree more. For more on voluntary national reviews see https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/hlpf#vnrs For more on voluntary national reviews see https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/hlpf#vnrs New INDEPTH strategy for the SDGs using robust population dataThe INDEPTH Network comprises 49 health and demographic surveillance systems (HDSSs) that monitor the lives of nearly 4 million individuals in 20 low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs). The HDSSs generate and publish robust population-based data on topics such as fertility, migration, mortality, and socioeconomic conditions. These data are needed at local, national, and global levels for setting health and population priorities and testing progress against them. HDSSs are also platforms for clinical and health intervention trials. Full-Text PDF Open Access