WHO: Call for Experts to be part of the Child Health Accountability Tracking Technical Advisory Group (CHAT TAG) (2024)

Background

To address the challenges of monitoring child health and development across the broad age range of children from 1 month to 9 years, WHO and UNICEF co-convened the Child Health Accountability Tracking Technical Advisory Group (CHAT TAG) in November 2018. The aim of CHAT is to promote accountability for child survival and development for children ages 1 month to 9 years, through improvements in measurement and monitoring. CHAT provides a forum for sharing and discussing the work of key child health and well-being measurement and monitoring initiatives and other relevant work of UNICEF and WHO.

It also engages with external organizations that are collecting and reporting child health data, to harmonize priority indicators and identify measurement gapsin child health and well-being.

CHAT-TAG is seeking new members to move the group’s objectives forward over the next two years.

Secretariat and structure of CHAT-TAG

The CHAT TAG is co-convened by WHO and UNICEF, which support CHAT through facilitating communications, management, and logistics for the group. CHAT TAG membership is reviewed every two years with current members able to re-apply for membership for one additional two-year term. The CHAT TAG currently has 14 members with meetings led by co-chairs who are elected by the TAG for a two-year term.

Objectives 2025-2026

The underlying principles of CHAT-TAG are to prioritize areas where no standard metrics or data collection metrics exist, support the use of validated, standard indicators when they exist, work closely with international and national data efforts.

• Provide advice to ongoing global measurement efforts in child health and development;
• Prioritize metrics for child health and development at the programmatic level;
• Identify measurement gaps in child health and development;
• Provide guidance and evaluate existing measurement and reporting tools, specifically around data use and with an orientation towards usefulness in countries; and
• Refine an online catalogue of validated tools for measuring and monitoring health indicators for children 1 month to 9 years of age (1).

Call for new members

CHAT-TAG is now seeking new members to help take the CHAT-TAG objectives forward in 2025-2026.

Selection of TAG members

Members of the CHAT TAG must have excellent technical knowledge including, but not restricted to:

• Broad knowledge of child health epidemiology;
• Familiarity with the means of collecting country-level information on health, education and WASH information including use of health facility surveys, household surveys, routine systems and demographic surveillance systems in developing country contexts;
• Experience with child health programmes at the country-level, including programmatic level monitoring;
• Quality assurance of country level data;
• Past experience in normative working groups of a technical nature;
• Experience in tracking progress towards coverage (and effective coverage) of key services for children;
• Knowledge of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) and their measurement at the country level, especially those aimed at reducing child mortality and morbidity;
• Experience in building capacity in monitoring and evaluation in low-and-middle income countries;
• Use of paediatric quality of care indicators at the facility level for quality improvement; and
• Knowledge of Health Management Information Systems (HMIS) and the use of the data collected in these systems to improve health care services in low- and- middle- income countries.

In addition, the CHAT-TAG will include members who have experience working in child health in low-and-middle income countries, with monitoring and evaluation expertise. In recruitment of new members, we strive for a balanced representation of genders and geographical locations. The CHAT-TAG is especially interested in including additional members with expertise in indicators related tononcommunicable diseases, disability, injury in young children, climate change and child healthas well as children’s health and development in humanitarian settings.

Process to identify members

1. Candidates are requested to submit:
   1. A brief curriculum vitae (2-3 pages)
   2. A list of authored papers to demonstrate area(s) of expertise and contributions to the field of measurement
   3. One example of a report or other work product
   4. A short statement discussing their measurement challenge priority (200 words max)
2. Short-listed nominees will be contacted by the WHO/UNICEF Secretariat to determine their interest and potential availability.
3. The Secretariat will review the nominations and identify up to 2 new proposed members, considering:
   1. Gender balance
   2. Geographic balance
   3. Technical expertise with regards to metrics research, epidemiology, monitoring & evaluation of child indicators/health, as related to knowledge of:
      1. Types of data collection instruments and analysis
      2. Data collection methodology
      3. Statistical methodology and analysis
      4. Demographic principles and analysis
      5. Issues of accountability and human rights; and
      6. The process of creating and validating indicators to measure programmatic progress
      7. Data use
4. The Secretariat will contact the selected members to discuss attendance at the next face-to-face meeting of CHAT-TAG in Nairobi Kenya 10-12 February 2025. Attendance at this meeting is mandatory for new CHAT members.
   

All nomination submissions should be sent to Dr Kathleen Strong (strongk@who.int), copied to Carolin Ekman (ekmanc@who.int) labelled“CHAT Nomination”.

Closing date for submission: 20 December 2024.