Improving health and well-being outcomes for children (age 1 month to 59 months, and 5 to 9 years) is a priority for WHO and UNICEF. CHAT is a technical advisory group to WHO and UNICEF. Its main objective is to support the harmonization and standardization of child health and well-being indicators, across a variety of domains including education, nutrition, mental health, violence, environment, and injuries as well as communicable and noncommunicable diseases.
The need for standard indicators is driven by the large number of global initiatives that have been created to meet targets for child health and well-being set by the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) of the past and the current Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This means that data are being captured by different sectors, disciplines and with different levels of disaggregations and data sources. Harmonized indicators are needed to streamline efforts and to focus on measuring the impact of our work to improve child health.The Child Health Accountability Tracking group (CHAT) meets this need and also provides guidance on standards for data collection tools and analysis. The group is Co-convened by WHO and UNICEF (the joint Secretariat) and supported by USAID.
Members
Members of the CHAT Technical Advisory Group are selected from applicants responding to an open call for independent experts in monitoring and evaluation of child health, with new calls for applicants issued periodically as needed. The selected experts (13 in all), have a broad knowledge of child health epidemiology and experience working in a wide range of low and middle income countries. They include clinicians, epidemiologists, demographers, statisticians and program implementers.
Secretariat
Senior Adviser Statistics & Monitoring (Health, Immunization, MNCAH & HIV), Division of Data, Analytics, Planning & Monitoring, UNICEF
Scientist, Department of Maternal, Newborn, Child and Adolescent Health and Ageing, World Health Organization, Geneva, Switzerland
Co-chairs
Maternal and Child Health Division, ICDDR, Dhaka, Banglades; Research Fellow, Sydney School of Public Health, The University of Sydney, Australia
Assistant Professor, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, Maryland, United States of America
Experts
Health Services Unit , KEMRI-Wellcome Trust Research Programme, Nairobi, Kenya
Professor at Education Futures, University of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia
Department of Environmental Health Sciences, Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, United States of America
Professor of Pediatrics at Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia, Lima, Peru.
Director, WHO Collaborating Centre for Maternal and Child Health; Professor of Global Child Health, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Health, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Scientist, Department of International Health at Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, United States of America.
Witten/Herdecke University, Faculty of Health/ School of Medicine, Witten, Germany
Research Scientist, African Population and Health Research Center (APHRC), Ethiopia
McGill University, Montreal, Canada
University of Maryland School of Medicine, RTI International, United States of America
Public Health Foundation of India, New Delhi, India and Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, Seattle, United States of America
University of Yamanashi, Japan
Zeina Jamaluddine
London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland; American University of Beirut, Beirut, Lebanon