If Ebola taught us anything, it likely can be boiled down to a couple of key principles:

  *   Access to health data can provide an “early warning system” if the data are shared up and down the line—from community organizations, to health facilities, to district health offices, and to national decision makers, and
  *   Collections of data—even when shared—are of little utility to spot emerging threats unless someone pays attention in a timely fashion to what the data are saying.
Travel with us to Guinea, where the USAID-funded MEASURE Evaluation project conducted a study of how routine health services were utilized and what data were available even as the epidemic persisted. A cautionary tale and, as this video reveals, the opportunity to make use of a silver lining. See it in English at https://vimeo.com/152664842<https://t.e2ma.net/click/s1qvw/kb5qnu/4qmukg> and in French at https://vimeo.com/153122906<https://t.e2ma.net/click/s1qvw/kb5qnu/kjnukg>.




[http://d31hzlhk6di2h5.cloudfront.net/20160126/55/6b/c3/43/8c06f2326da6f3143d768896_350x194.png]<https://t.e2ma.net/click/s1qvw/kb5qnu/0boukg>








MEASURE Evaluation is funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) under terms of Cooperative Agreement AID-OAA-L-14-00004 and implemented by the Carolina Population Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partnership with ICF International, John Snow, Inc., Management Sciences for Health, Palladium, and Tulane University. The views expressed in this e-mail do not necessarily reflect the views of USAID or the United States government.