Sources of population and health data

We utilize a number of publicly available data sources on this blog and today we highlight those sources to encourage data utilization. Data is important because it can be used to generate evidence to make informed decisions, to help solve problems, to plan and make predictions, provide support of arguments etc.


Most international development agencies have databases with a variety of indicators that do not require any statistical analysis and can be used by anyone. These include demographic data from the U.N; health data from the WHO; development data from the World Bank; labour force data from the ILO; and education data from UNESCO.

The Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) and the Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) collect a wealth of demographic and health information and conduct repeated  surveys in countries which allows for looking at time trends. These surveys produce detailed reports that present a considerable amount of data.

Standardized covid-19 case counts for regions in Ghana

We discussed in our earlier post that differences in population size can make it difficult to compare absolute numbers across different populations. Today we present standardized covid-19 case counts by region for Ghana to compare the severity of the outbreak by region.

Why do we need standardized statistics?

Let's look at data on deaths from the WHO covid-19 dashboard for 31st May 2020. The WHO dashboard has two options for statistics - total numbers which is shown in the left column and numbers per 1,000,000 population shown in the right column.

Five out of the ten countries in the column on the left column do not appear in the right column. The United States, the country with the most deaths overall, did not make it to the top 10 in deaths per 1,000,000 population. It is ranked 12 with 307 deaths per 1,000,000 population. Rather, San Marino which has recorded 42 deaths in total is leading the list of countries with deaths per 1 million population. 

This illustrates why it is important to also standardize absolute numbers when reporting statistics. While the total death toll numbers are informative by themselves, standardized figures allow us to compare the impact on the population across different countries better than absolute numbers.

Interpreting covid-19 statistics

Reporting on covid-19 typically tends to include a variety of statistics. Beyond the number of cases, there are infection rates, case fatality rates etc. Today we explain what some of those numbers and statistics mean.