World health organization

Statistics: finding public health trends

Young child being held by his mother
WHO/Gurinder Osan

Monitoring progress

Two Millennium Development Goals set in 2000 relate to targets for reducing child and maternal deaths by 2015. But how can progress on these or other health objectives be monitored without reliable statistics? Evaluating health programmes accurately is only possible if investments are made in health information systems to allow the collection of better data.

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