Data-to-action EPHI-CHAMPS Ethiopia project
The National Data Management Center for health (NDMC) has been engaged in Child Health and Mortality Prevention Surveillance (CHMAPS) Ethiopia project since 2017 on the data-to-action part of the project. Being the technical wing for the Federal Ministry of Health (FMOH), the NDMC is responsible to translate evidence generated from the project for high level decisions. The center also works to ensure project findings are informing policy and strategies at FMoH and other stakeholders. To this end, NDMC integrate and triangulate the CHAMPS data with data coming from diverse sources, prepare evidence briefs, summary reports and publications. To maximize the use of EPHI-CHAMPS Ethiopia project data and promotion of the project, the centre organizes stakeholder meetings and discussion forums involving relevant stakeholders. Moreover, the center incorporates the high quality data from the CHAMPS Ethiopia project for improving sub-national and national childhood mortality and causes of death estimation.
Childhood mortality is one of the priority health challenges in low income settings. In these settings measuring mortality and ascertaining cause of deaths is as challenging as the mortality itself due to lack of organized vital registration systems. As a result, overall mortality is underestimated and causes of deaths are often misclassified, which gives in accurate information for mortality modelling/forecasting and instituting interventions for major killers. Credible and accurate mortality data would enable policy-makers, stakeholders, donors to effectively target the leading causes of childhood mortality for interventions, a critical component for achieving the Sustainable Development Goal for eliminating preventable childhood deaths.
The CHAMPS project, using an innovative approach intends to generate high quality data on the cause of under-five mortality from minimally invasive tissue sampling (MITS). This approach helps to reduce uncertainty around cause of death determination in high mortality settings, where clinical and postmortem diagnoses are nearly always unavailable, and where performance of complete diagnostic autopsy would not be feasible and Ethiopia is one of the settings. The CHAMPS network track the causes of under-5 mortality and stillbirths at sites in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. The CHAMPS Ethiopia project has established within Haromaya University.