[Alma Mata] A new institute for global health evaluations

[Tiago Villanueva]

The Lancet 2007; 369:1902


DOI:10.1016/S0140-6736(07)60890-3
Editorial

A new institute for global health evaluations






The Gates Foundation this week announced a new initiative to
strengthen capacity for evaluating international health programmes.
The Health Metrics and Evaluation Institute will be sited at the
University of Washington in Seattle with a US$105 million core grant
from the Gates Foundation over 10 years. It will be led by Chris
Murray, who is leaving Harvard University. The institute's board will
be chaired by Julio Frenk, the former Minister of Health for Mexico.

The new institute fills a critical gap. The enormous political and
financial attention now being paid to global health has not been
matched by improved sources of information on the performance of
health systems and new health programmes. This shortfall in knowledge
is hampering efforts to create a favourable environment for
investments in health. Worst of all, the evidence gap is harming work
to improve the health of the most vulnerable populations in the world.

While the hub of this new venture will be in Seattle, Murray and his
colleagues will also create an international network of collaborating
centres to address key health needs. Their plans include the
publication of an annual report card on global health, new tools for
training in evaluation methods, and a freely accessible electronic
global databank of health information.

Existing agencies charged with monitoring and evaluating global
health—eg, WHO, UNICEF, and the World Bank—may wonder if this new
Gates initiative will compete with their own work. Far from it. These
agencies have often struggled to maintain the technical capacity to
guarantee a steady improvement in global health knowledge. The Gates
initiative will complement their work and add new dimensions of rigour
to their analyses. Priorities for the institute will include the
analysis, synthesis, reporting, and archiving of data on mortality,
causes of death, incidence and prevalence of disease and disability,
burden of disease, health risks, coverage of priority interventions,
resource flows, and health system assessments.

This much needed initiative deserves wide support.

-- 
Tiago Villanueva

tiago.villanueva at gmail.com

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