Reliable evidence is essential for health. Data are needed to formulate new health polices and strategies, to ensure quality and equity of health-care services and universal health coverage, to design effective health-care interventions, prioritize health challenges and mobilize resources, and to monitor progress at national and subnational levels. Low- and middle-income countries often lack strong vital statistics data, and health decisions are based on data from censuses, surveys, surveillance and administrative data sources. Studies such as the Global Burden of Disease (GBD), which quantifies health loss from hundreds of diseases, injuries and risk factors, are essential to complement local evidence sources and bridge evidence gaps. Ethiopia has a strong collaboration with the GBD, supported by grants from development partners, but this could be improved by greater collaboration and additional in-country investments.

Ethiopia established a collaboration between the Ethiopian Public Health Institute (EPHI), under the Ministry of Health, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), and an expert network of more than 800 GBD collaborators, who jointly produce national and subnational estimates of burdens of disease. This evidence informs our health sector transformation plan and is used to revise essential health service packages, develop non-communicable disease strategies, assess national health expenditures and mobilize resources, measure key health indicators and track progress, devise strategies to narrow disparities between subnational states, and respond to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The collaboration with IHME has helped us to establish a National Data Management and Analytics Center at EPHI. The center’s multi-disciplinary team works to enhance health data repository and governance systems, advance in-country health data analytics and generate quality scientific evidence, and translate evidence into policy and decisions. We are establishing similar centers at subnational levels that are helping us to understand our own health data landscape in Ethiopia, allowing us to identify future potential uses of health data, understand technical and data infrastructure limitations, and devise new strategies.

Our use of GBD data is not without challenges. Some findings have big uncertainties and may not be consistent between GBD iterations, which may be owing to lack of quality data inputs or new methods being used over time. But consistency of key health indicators is essential to measure progress and track disparities between and within countries. The advanced methods used by GBD can only be understood by trained experts, which requires a considerable in-country investment to understand the relevance of the findings for health policy and strategy. There are also challenges in accessing already available data, which is needed to improve the estimates.

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