INDEPTH Network

This Organizational Effectiveness grant will enable the International Network for the Continuous Demographic Evaluation of Populations and Their Health (INDEPTH) to develop and implement a policy engagement strategy. It is anticipated that this will allow the member sites to develop trusted relationships with end-users of research and be more effective in translating research into development policies and practices, and in turn increase INDEPTH’s visibility in the international community. This grant will complement a previous grant awarded to INDEPTH to increase its fundraising capacity.

Since 2008, Hewlett has provided funding to the International Network for the Continuous Demographic Evaluation of Populations and Their Health (INDEPTH), a network of 41 member centers which run 48 Health and Demographic Surveillance Systems (HDSS) in 21 African, Asian, and Oceanian countries. Important contributions HDSS have the potential to make include: (1) In the absence of adequate national civil registries and vital statistics, they can provide a high-quality longitudinal data that can be used to track population dynamics, health, and social change; (2) They can provide a platform for intervention studies, including impact evaluations of programs and policies to reduce disease burden and to improve health; (3) They can provide a source of data for understanding basic relationships among economic, social, and health variables; and (4) They can provide opportunities to strengthen and retain local research capacity. With this organizational effectiveness grant, INDEPTH plans to hire Mishkin Associates to develop a fundraising plan and train the INDEPTH Secretariat’s staff on how to implement the plan. We expect that this will help INDEPTH to diversify its funding base for core support, as well as to secure additional funding to sustain and expand cross-site research projects in which it is involved.

Effective social and health policies depend on monitoring and understanding of health, ecological, and demographic data in their local and regional contexts. The INDEPTH Network comprises forty-two health and demographic surveillance systems (HDSSs) in nineteen countries. Together, these HDSS sites collect health, demographic, and other data on nearly 3 million people during regular visits to households in geographically defined areas. Longitudinal data on these households, some tracked for decades, are important for studies exploring how policies and programs affect people’s well-being. The HDSS sites cover rural and urban populations with diverse social, health, and development contexts, providing a broad platform for comparative research. Unrestricted funding would enable the Network to investigate, analyze, inform, and contribute to global attempts to improve the health and well-being of populations in low- and middle-income countries. Among the core functions of the Accra-based secretariat of the Network are coordinating cross-site activities; organizing capacity-strengthening workshops and the annual conference; ensuring data quality; and sharing research results and best practices with policymakers and the scientific community.