Fact Sheet: Strengthening an Organization's Capacity to Demand and Use Data

Author(s):

Year: 2011

Abstract:

Significant human and financial resources have been invested worldwide in the collection of population, facility, and community-based data. However, this information is often not used by key stakeholders to inform policy and programmatic decision making effectively, as part of an overall data demand and use (DDU or DDIU) plan. As a result, many health programs fail to fully link evidence to decisions and suffer from a decreased ability to respond to priority needs of the populations they serve. There are many possible factors that undermine evidence-based decision making which related to (1) how information flows to decision-makers and how they make their decisions, (2) the context in which information collected and decisions are made, and (3) the organizational infrastructure and technical capacity of those that generate and use data.