Maternal, newborn, child & adolescent health
Data portal
About GAMA
What is GAMA trying to achieve?
To improve adolescent health measurement globally, by harmonizing and prioritizing indicators.
Why is it significant?
Global adolescent health can only be improved if we are able to track progress towards health targets. This is only possible through harmonised and consistent measurement.
How is GAMA trying to achieve this?
An Advisory Group consisting of 17 global experts, including 4 young professionals, has been established to advise WHO and UN partners.
First tasks will include:
First tasks will include:
- Definition of priority areas in adolescent health.
- Mapping of the measurement landscape, including a mapping of existing measurement groups, and of indicators used.
What difference will it make?
- It will help to better track progress of improving adolescent health.
- It will reduce duplication of measurement efforts through better global coordination.
- It will reduce burden on countries through consistent measurement tools and reduced double reporting.
Why now?
- With 1.2 billion people aged 10-19 years, we currently have the largest adolescent population in human history.
- Investments in this population will not only yield benefits for adolescents now, but also for their future adult lives and their future children.
Adolescents – young people between the ages of 10 and 19 years – play a crucial role in achieving many of the Sustainable Development Goals. They represent over 16% of the global population, and investments in adolescents now will also
benefit their future adult lives and their future children.
Measurement of health behaviours and determinants, outcomes, and policy and programme implementation is essential to track progress towards improving adolescent health.
Recognizing this need, the number of organizations collecting data to monitor adolescent health in countries across a wide range of domains increased. However, adolescent health data collection efforts and indicators used are often not standardized or consistently used across countries and populations, limiting the comparability, sharing and use of the data.
To address these issues and improve alignment and capacity for adolescent health measurement, WHO, in collaboration with the UN H6+ partnership agencies (UNAIDS, UNESCO, UNFPA, UNICEF, UN Women, the World Bank Group, and the World Food Programme (WFP),
has established the Global Action for Measurement of Adolescent health (GAMA) Advisory Group. This Group of experts advises WHO and UNH6+ partners in their process of harmonizing and prioritizing adolescent health indicators, to converge data collection
and reporting efforts.
Goals of GAMA
The goals of GAMA’s work are:
To provide technical guidance to WHO, UN H6+ agencies and other relevant measurement groups to define a core set of adolescent health indicators, for the purpose of harmonizing efforts around adolescent health measurement and reporting.
To promote harmonized guidance for adolescent health measurement, supporting countries and technical organizations in collecting useful data to track progress in the improvement of adolescent health.
For more information on GAMA’s terms of reference and workplan, please click here.
GAMA's Scope
To access GAMA’s Scope, please click here.