Assessing healthy longevity in low- and middle-income countries: An applied performance dashboard for India

Abstract

<title>Abstract</title> <bold>Background:</bold> The global population is aging rapidly, contributing to major changes in disease and demographic profiles. To support low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) to address these major demographic changes, the World Bank Healthy Longevity Initiative (HLI) focuses on enhancing human capital, reducing poverty, and improving gender equality using a life-course approach. The HLI calls for strengthening of country data systems with the use of performance dashboards for monitoring and action to assess status and progress on healthy longevity and to enable comparison with peer countries. Here, we describe a novel HLI performance dashboard for LMICs with limited or moderate existing data. <bold>Methods:</bold> Building on existing indicators from internationally comparable datasets, the HLI dashboard comprises 37 indicators mapped to ten domains pertaining to demography, health, social, and economic outcomes across the life course. The indicators are selected against a set of pre-defined criteria that are outcome-focused, easy-to-measure, and based mostly on available survey data. For each indicator, the study country is assessed relative to other countries in the same World Bank income group using a scoring system of 0-100%. <bold>Results:</bold> For most HLI health indicators, India falls in the score categories of 25-&lt;50% and 50-&lt;75% among lower-middle-income countries. India fares better on obesity than most other lower-middle-income countries, but lags substantially on the child growth indicators of stunting, wasting, and underweight. In terms of social and economic indicators, India falls in the 50-&lt;75% category for many of these indicators. However, it performs worse than 75% of other lower-middle-income countries in female labour force participation. <bold>Conclusions:</bold> Using India as an example, we find that the HLI dashboard offers an easily-reproducible and intuitive approach to measure performance. With improved data availability and engagement with the general public and policymakers on indicators selection, the dashboard can be adapted to monitor the key components of healthy longevity during a time of rapid demographic change in many countries.

Affiliated Institutions

• Centre for Global Health Research CA
• World Bank Group US
• 3M (United States) US

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