National Health Data Metrics System for Informed Decision (Health-MIND)- Ethiopia
Newsletter July 2025
Background
Data on fertility, mortality, causes of death, and social determinants of health are essential for understanding key health indicators at both national and regional levels. These datasets provide vital insights into health metrics such as the maternal mortality rate, under-five mortality rate, and cause-specific and age specific mortality rates. They also help quantify the burden of diseases across regional, zonal, and district levels in Ethiopia. This information is crucial for guiding high-level decision-making, supporting evidence-based health planning, enabling effective resource mobilization, and setting strategic priorities within the health system.
The National Data Management and Analytics Center (NDMC) at Ethiopian Public health institute (EPHI) has been exploring historical countrywide data that showed only limited data were available and accessible for national and subnational uses. Most of the data sources lack representativeness, completeness, consistency, timeliness, appropriate data codebook and storage. This experience and challenges have led to design a Sample Registration System (SRS) to generate real time data to fill gaps and help the country to track progress towards achieving the SDGs, and facilitate evidence informed decisions. The proposed SRS is a strategic intervention to establish a nationally representative and scalable solution to enhance
mortality surveillance, improve vital statistics results, pandemic and epidemic control interventions and guide public health policy. This pilot SRS (Health-MIND) complement the existing systems by creating an effective and sustainable cohort infrastructure for fertility, mortality and cause of death data collection system.
This newsletter summarizes key activities related to the Health-MIND (SRS pilot), including its official launch, the MoU signing with regional partners, the TOT workshop, and further outlines next steps for the national rollout of the pilot SRS.
The National Data Management and Analytics Center (NDMC) at Ethiopian Public health institute (EPHI) has been exploring historical countrywide data that showed only limited data were available and accessible for national and subnational uses. Most of the data sources lack representativeness, completeness, consistency, timeliness, appropriate data codebook and storage. This experience and challenges have led to design a Sample Registration System (SRS) to generate real time data to fill gaps and help the country to track progress towards achieving the SDGs, and facilitate evidence informed decisions. The proposed SRS is a strategic intervention to establish a nationally representative and scalable solution to enhance
mortality surveillance, improve vital statistics results, pandemic and epidemic control interventions and guide public health policy. This pilot SRS (Health-MIND) complement the existing systems by creating an effective and sustainable cohort infrastructure for fertility, mortality and cause of death data collection system.
This newsletter summarizes key activities related to the Health-MIND (SRS pilot), including its official launch, the MoU signing with regional partners, the TOT workshop, and further outlines next steps for the national rollout of the pilot SRS.
