Service Delivery Indicators (SDI), a new Africa-wide initiative that collects data on service delivery in schools and health facilities, has been launched by the World Bank in partnership with the African Economic Research Consortium and the African Development Bank. SDI data are used to assess the quality and performance of health services for decision makers to track progress over time, and for citizens to hold governments accountable for public spending. No other set of indicators is available for measuring service delivery performance and quality at health facilities from the perspective of citizens.

SDI survey teams visit a representative sample of health facilities in each country. The surveys they produce are intended to be representative of rural and urban areas, public and private providers, and the regions or provinces of some countries. Visiting unannounced, SDI teams assess the levels of absenteeism among health workers. Health workers are assessed with patient case simulation or vignettes.

The Service Delivery Indicators (SDI) provide a set of metrics for benchmarking service delivery performance in health. The overall objective of the indicators is to gauge the quality of service delivery in basic health services. The indicators enable the identification of gaps and tracking of progress over time and across countries. It is envisaged that the broad availability, high public awareness, and a persistent focus on the indicators will mobilize policymakers, citizens, service providers, donors, and other stakeholders for action to improve the quality of services and ultimately to improve development outcomes and social welfare. See http://www.sdindicators.org for more information.

Using this Respository

This repository contains de-identified data from ten rounds of SDI data on health facilities across nine countries. It provides code to clean and harmonize these into a single “Service Delivery Indicators Health Surveys” dataset, containing background information and vignettes results for 10,230 provider interactions. This data can be freely used to conduct analysis, and this repository serves as a central clearinghouse for comments and improvements that are needed in the harmonization of the data. View the repository on the World Bank GitHub to access the materials. We recommend including this repository in your analysis repository as a submodule using the Git command:

git submodule add https://github.com/worldbank/SDI-Health.git SDI-Health

Acknowledgements

Data prepared and do-files written by Anna Konstantinova and Benjamin Daniels, with support from Jishnu Das, Waly Wane, Christophe Rockmore, and Matthew Collins. Materials will be updated periodically.