The International Center for Equity in Health (ICEH) has been actively engaged in collaboration with the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) as a designated WHO Collaborating Centre for Health Equity Monitoring since 2017. Under the leadership of Professors Aluisio Barros, Cesar Victora, and Dr Fernando Wehrmeister, this partnership has been instrumental in advancing global efforts to monitor health equity. The ICEH's designation, denoted as collaborating center BRA 84, was initially conferred from 2017 to 2021. This collaboration was successfully renewed in 2021, reaffirming ICEH's commitment to assist the WHO in addressing health disparities and promoting equitable health outcomes on a global scale. As a collaborating center, our activities are related to providing technical assistance on health inequality monitoring for the WHO Member States.
The collaboration's core activity is maintaining an updated WHO global database of disaggregated data on reproductive, maternal, and child health. Data from nationally representative surveys, especially DHS and MICS, are re-analyzed to provide a large number of indicators disaggregated by several dimensions of inequality.These datasets publicly available through the Health Equity Assessment Toolkit (HEAT) and the Health Inequality Data Repository.
Additional activities include data analysis, products, development, and training and education to strengthen countries' capacity for health equity monitoring. Several outputs from this collaboration are disseminated through scientific manuscripts and technical reports. Some examples include but are not limited to, an analysis of zero-dose immunization, the development of a new equity stratifier called Socioeconomic Deprivation Status (SDS), and inequalities in adolescent childbearing in Latin America and the Caribbean. On the various pages of this website, an array of our tools, products, and outputs are presented, explained, and made available where applicable.
More on the WHO Collaborating Centres can be found here.