The Health Equity Monitor was launched a couple of weeks ago, as the latest part of WHO Health Observatory to go live. Instead of only national averages, the Health Equity Monitor shows data by wealth quintiles, area of residence and women’s education. Information is shown mainly through interactive visualizations that allow the user to select different sets of countries to explore. Income level and WHO world regions are possible selectable sets. It is also possible to select countries - single or multiple selections. Hovering the mouse pointer over the graph shows several different types of information. The display always maintains a background distribution of coverage for the selected indicator.

The tool is very useful for exploring health equity in a given country, set of countries or region. It is easy to see, for instance, that São Tomé e Príncipe is the country with the highest coverage for skilled birth attendant (SBA) for the poorest 20% in Africa (76%). And that while Congo has the highest coverage of SBA for the richest 20% (96%), only 68% of the poorest were covered.

The person behind the production of these visualizations is Dr. Ahmad Hosseinpoor, Department of Health Statistics and Informatics, WHO. Using the data provided by the ICEH, on coverage of a series of maternal and child health indicators stratified by wealth quintiles, maternal education, area of residence, region of the country and sex of the child (where applicable), Dr. Ahmad has been preparing visualizations that are highly informative and easy to use. New visualizations are planned for a near future.