The Indepth-Network provides a platform for 38 Demographic Surveillance Sites in 19 South based countries for scientific exchange and technical collaborations. The DSS sites spanning Africa, South Asia,Central America and Oceania vary widely in their geographic locations and institutional capabilities to cover their populations. Though all member sites share a common interest of demographic and health surveillance, each site has its own diverse yet often similar, health research portfolio of relevance and importance in the national and international context.

    Many sites operate within university and academic settings; some are linked to research institutions or health systems with varying capacities. Though all sites collect core demographic surveillance information on vital events like fertility and mortality and migrations, they vary in the populations that they cover, their location (urban / rural), the methodologies used, the periodicity etc. which adds to the diversity and richness of information.

    The Indepth-Network has made considerable efforts to standardize and harmonize data collection tools by developing the Starter Kit, an invaluable resource for new and developing DSS sites. One critical gap which remains to be fully addressed has been the wide variation in the data management systems adapted by different sites from the Household Registrations Systems (HRS v2) software module developed by the Network. Past and ongoing research collaborations (e.g. the Migration and Urbanization Working Group) within the Network have highlighted weaknesses in data management systems in some sites as well as the absence of any mechanism and a common platform for easy and efficient sharing of databases.

    For the Network to position itself as a single international window for DSS and make it the point of ‘first call’ by bilateral and multilateral international organizations, it is recognized that the Network ensures not just cross-site comparability of information but also develop a prototype for sharing information efficiently amongst sites. The prototype then can be extended to sharing information beyond Indepth sites after quality assurance in the public domain once a consensus has been built for the same. This proposal aims to build institutional and individual capacity in data management, training young scientists in data quality control and data mining techniques, and developing and deploying new methodologies to share their data effectively and efficiently for cross-site comparisons.