Tracking

Are we on track or off track in reaching for our global health goals? Without solid measurement tools, we would be lost.

There are myriad health interventions across many countries and involving multiple players, yet there is no global “command and control” system. As decentralized decision-making and “country-ownership” – rightly – take hold, it is becoming more difficult to monitor and track-progress in real-time. As a result, data are often reported with more than a year’s delay and are used to “report-up” rather than at local levels to inform local decisions. The UN Special Envoy’s Office helps gauge the collective efforts of development agencies, governments and donors to achieve the Health MDG targets, working to understand whether the global community is “on track” or “off track” to achieving its goals and identifying where extra support or coordination may be needed to achieve the targets by December 31, 2015.

Working with our partners, such as the RMNCH Strategy and Coordination Team, we are attempting to capture the cumulative impact of key health commodities scale-up, combined with partner programs and country plans on a quarterly basis (some data will be available on a monthly basis and some less frequently, depending on availability). The objective of these efforts is to assess whether these collective efforts are “on track” or “off track” in achieving the 2015 targets and to identify where extra support or coordination may be needed to get efforts “on track.”

We will work with our partners such as the World Health Organization, UNICEF and others, to “triangulate” different sources of data – including data from mosquito net manufacturers themselves – who will provide us with monthly production data in order to track efforts as broadly as possible. These analyses will guide the thinking of the Special Envoy’s Office, development partners and country governments around the highest value levers for our office and partners to pursue.