The GAVI Alliance strategy and business plan for 2013-2014 includes a range of activities related to the assessment and improvement of immunization coverage data quality. These activities include assessment of numerators from country administrative data systems, assessment of denominator data, conduct of household surveys, refinement of WHO/UNICEF estimates of national immunization coverage and support to countries in development and implementation of data quality improvement plans. Additionally, the GAVI Alliance invests in vaccine preventable disease surveillance systems, targeted studies and evaluations—these activities provide a basis to triangulate data across multiple approaches. In addition to the business plan items listed below, the guidelines for GAVI’s health systems strengthening (HSS) grants to countries recommend that countries invest approximately 5-10% of the grant amount in M&E strengthening activities. At present, no investment framework is provided to give guidance on how these investments may be structured. In practice, the majority of countries spend substantially less than this amount on M&E strengthening activities.
