Grant: Planning and Dissemination Grant - Institute Community Support

Population and health system data gaps have been identified as major global health challenges. Health Ministers from G7 countries, including Canada, have recently prioritized investing in data systems as part of global health system strengthening efforts. These data challenges are particularly dire in low and middle-income countries (LMICs), where there are fewer population and health systems data available. However, thanks to the spread of more powerful and more affordable information technologies and the investments of governments and donor partners, many LMICs are now implementing strong national health information systems (HIS). But while the scale-up of these systems has been relatively quick, the use of these data for both planning and research purposes has been markedly slower due both to poorly developed user interfaces to extract data as well as limited investments in capacity to extract and interpret data, in particular at the sub-national level. In short, simply collecting more data does not mean that such data will actually be used effectively and there is a need to understand barriers to the use of data at the sub-national level and expand capacity to facilitate the use of these data at the local level for health system planning and evaluation purposes. The purpose of this research project is to build upon this identified research priority and the expertise of our research team to build an innovative research program around the use of sub-national health system data in Zambia. The project will finance preliminary research, host a series of interviews and meeting meetings with knowledge users and other stakeholders, establish an innovative research agenda on the ways to improve data use at subnational levels to improve population level health, and further strengthen Canada's global health research expertise.