A wider perspective: Measurement as a public good for research

contribute to strengthening national administrative systems by demonstrating and promoting the use of data for policy making; enhancing local capacity to produce, use, and reuse data; and helping to build a proper legal and regulatory framework for data generation and applications.

The evolving scope of the SDI surveys, as outlined in this chapter, will allow for deeper analysis and a greater range of analytic objectives. However, these new initiatives will need to be balanced against the increased complexity and cost of the survey. Part of the goal of these revisions has been to increase the flexibility of the SDI survey, allowing for deep dives into issues that interest the national government, while maintaining a core of comparable measurements across countries. The SDI survey can be woven into existing country-level data initiatives, adding detail where needed. Because countries vary in their burden of disease, the organization of their health systems, and their existing data systems, any additions will be context dependent and tailored to the specific objectives of the survey.

The SDI evidence is intended to guide policy makers, stakeholders, and citizens in shared action to strengthen health and education systems—enabling services to work better for average people and laying the foundations for inclusive growth. Although this contribution is important, the potential uses of SDI data do not end there. In addition to the direct usefulness of its results for policy makers, service providers, and citizens, the SDI initiative provides relevant inputs for future research.

The SDI program has invested considerable resources in cleaning, harmonizing, and anonymizing SDI data to make the information available and useful to the scientific community. SDI data are harmonized and available through the data portal, www.sdindicators.org. The earlier releases of some of these data were accompanied by a significant increase in the number of publications using SDI data or referencing the SDI survey tool. Thus far, SDI surveys have been featured in about 45 publications authored by local and international scholars. Among these publications, more than 15 peer-reviewed academic articles have been published in leading economics, education, and health journals.10 Use of the data helps to underline the surveys’ rigor and relevance for both policy and research.

The SDI program expects that the most recent data release, with improved harmonization methods, will make the data more accessible to researchers and promote their use in a growing number of academic publications. In particular, the time trends in countries with repeated SDI surveys (such as Kenya and Tanzania) offer important opportunities for further learning.11 Simultaneously, this new release seeks to facilitate the work of policy-oriented