Welcome to our eighth edition of More than Numbers.
The e-newsletter that keeps you up-to-date on what is happening in the Civil Registration and Vital Statistics (CRVS) arm of the
Bloomberg Philanthropies Data for Health Initiative (BD4H)
by the University of Melbourne (UoM).
Dear colleagues,
Firstly, we are pleased to report that in October Bloomberg Philanthropies announced that an additional US$120 million has been added in funding to expand the Data for Health (D4H) initiative over four years from April, 2019. This will allow an increasing in the number of countries included in the partnership from 20 to 25 - reaching over 1.5 billion people.
The Australian government’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) is continuing its partnership with D4H, investing US$11 million toward the total. This partnership has already had a significant impact on improving CRVS data globally and has had a special impact in the Pacific region,
particularly in Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands where the technical interventions being implemented by the University of Melbourne team are beginning to yield valuable data for policy.
We are making progress; more importantly, the countries which we are supporting are making progress towards better, more cost-effective and more sustainable CRVS data collection practices. I hope that you will enjoy reading about these achievements reported in this newsletter. We have continued to strengthen CRVS capacity across all countries with our highly-successful CRVS Fellows program; we are delighted to introduce you to our six new fellows in this Newsletter to give you a sense of the exciting and game-changing skills that they are acquiring under this program.
We also continue to generate
evidence and knowledge to inform CRVS development strategies everywhere; these are included in our CRVS Knowledge Gateway and feature our latest resources, including a Summary Report from Phase 2 (April 2017 to March 2019).
I hope you enjoy reading how we are collectively changing CRVS systems and data worldwide; remember – better data leads to better decisions leads to better population health outcomes!
Best wishes,
Laureate Professor Alan Lopez AC, Director
Have comments or suggestions for future content?
Email us at crvs-info@unimelb.edu.au
The Data for Health Initiative is funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Australian Government's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT)