Indepth Network meeting opens

Thursday, September 25, 2008 (Daily Graphic Pg 5

Story: Rebecca Kwei, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

The Deputy Minister of Health and Social Welfare of Tanzania, Dr Aisha Omar Kigoda, has called on African governments to use available evidence from research and information systems in the hub of policy development and implementation.
She said evidence-based policy approach helps in making better informed decisions about policies, programmes and strategies.
Speaking at the opening ceremony of the 8th Indepth Network Annual General and Scientific Meeting in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania on the theme ‘Indepth @ 10: From Knowledge Generation to Improved Health Policy and Practice, Dr Kigoda noted that despite enormous advances in information technology, Africa with many emerging economies, remains starved of vital health and equity information.
“Trends in demographics, health status, burdens of disease, causes of death, and access to functional health systems, which could help scientists and strategists in health and development tools remain largely hidden from view,” she said.
The only way to get information that reflect the health status and needs of rural and urban communities, she said was to go to the communities and households adding that “that is what Indepth HDSS sites do so well”.
She observed that HDSS sites apart from providing a platform of demographic and health surveillance sites for monitoring impact of interventions can also aid in tracking new health threats such as climate change, dynamics in household food security, emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases, drug and insecticide resistance and can help alert the health community to prepare a response.
Dr Kigoda said the burden of disease was still unacceptably high especially among women and children and there was the need for more bodies such as Indepth to continue collecting data, generating information, and producing local evidence that will help guide the health and other social sectors addressing such dynamics.
She said so far Indepth was the only network in Africa facilitating a functioning system across 19 countries which provides the much needed sentinel information with regard to time, accurate, birth, death and migration trends.
The Assistant Director of General, Information, Evidence and Research Cluster, World Health Organisation, Tim Evans who was represented by Dr Clara AbouZahr, called on Indepth to consider linking to emerging global collaboration on health metrics and evaluation and also nurture early and ongoing engagement among key policy makers and all people.
The board chairman of Indepth, Dr Seth Owusu-Agyei, said the network has made significant strides in the past 10 years and the decisions that would be taken at the meeting will take it to the next level.
More than 200 participants comprising scientists, researchers, young scientists and donors are taking part in the conference.
Indepth Network is an independent organisation that works to provide health, social and demographic data and research. Currently, the network has 37 community-based Health and Demographic Surveillance Systems (HDSS) sites in 19 countries in Africa, Asia, Oceania and Central America. In Ghana the sites are located at Dodowa, Kintampo and Navrongo.