Metrics ― What Counts in Global Health

Using ethnographic evidence from around the globe, this volume's contributors evaluate the accomplishments, limits, and the consequences of using metrics as primary tools for global health. Whether analyzing maternal mortality rates in Southeastern Africa to highlight the assumptions built into equations, outlining the links between political goals and metrics data in Nigeria and Alaska, or discussing how health outcomes are tied to calculating a program's monetary worth in Haiti, the contributors question the ability of metrics to offer universal standards for solving global health problems. While using metrics can improve health and open up new kinds of political and fiscal opportunities, they also have the ability to obstruct the treatment of specific cases and discount what people know about their own lives. Metrics captures a moment when global health scholars and practitioners must evaluate the potential effectiveness and pitfalls of using metrics—the ideal implementation of which remains elusive and problematic.