Context

The Global Polio Eradication Initiative is a public-private partnership whose goal is to eradicate polio worldwide.  GPEI is led by national governments with six partners – the World Health Organization (WHO), Rotary International, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Gavi, the vaccine alliance. Most data for polio eradication is collected at the country level from multiple sources, aggregated at WHO regional offices and headquarters, where it is disseminated for use by GPEI partners.

Prior to 2013, GPEI’s Polio data were scattered across multiple file repositories in multiple formats.  Periodic reporting was laborious and time-consuming.  Data managers manually cleaned, harmonized and aggregated data from countries and regions without the benefit of common reference data.  The reporting process was email-based, error-prone and did not accurately reflect the status of program progress against eradication goals. GPEI partners could not easily obtain the data they needed to conduct their own critical analysis.

Objectives

• Get an accurate global picture of polio activities to articulate eradication strategies
• Harmonize and consolidate polio data from a wide range of sources
• Simplify data management through automation
• Enforce quality checks at all levels
• Make standard set of outputs readily available
• Facilitate information sharing and implementation of new streams of data