The INDEPTH Network provides a platform for currently 42 Health and Demographic Surveillance Systems in 19 countries in Africa, Asia and Oceania for scientific exchange and technical collaborations. The HDSS centres spanning Africa, Asia, and Oceania vary widely in their geographic locations and institutional capabilities to cover their populations. Though all member centres share a common interest of demographic and health surveillance, each centre has its own diverse yet often similar, health research portfolio of relevance and importance in the national and international context.

Health and Demographic Surveillance Systems (HDSS) began as a means of tracking longitudinal demographic changes to populations in developing countries. Unlike prospective (cohort) studies, HDSS are able to monitor entire populations and are usually larger and longer term. Field sites collect data on births, deaths (including causes) and migration which provide an important resource for evaluating health care interventions.

Many centres operate within university and academic settings; some are linked to research institutions or health systems with varying capacities. Though all centres collect core demographic surveillance information on vital events like fertility, mortality and migrations, they vary in the populations that they cover, their location (urban / rural), the methodologies used, the periodicity etc. which adds to the diversity and richness of information.

The INDEPTH Network has made considerable efforts to standardize and harmonize data collection tools by developing the Starter Kit, an invaluable resource for new and developing HDSSs. One critical gap which remains to be fully addressed has been the wide variation in the data management systems adapted by different centres from the Household Registrations Systems (HRS v2) software module developed by the Network. Past and ongoing research collaborations (e.g. the Migration and Urbanization Working Group) within the Network have highlighted weaknesses in data management systems in some centres as well as the absence of any mechanism and a common platform for easy and efficient sharing of databases.

For the Network to position itself as a single international window for HDSSs and make it the point of 'first call' by bilateral and multilateral international organizations, it is imperative that the Network ensures not just cross-site comparability of information but also develops a prototype for sharing information efficiently amongst centres. The prototype then can be extended to sharing information beyond INDEPTH centres after quality assurance in the public domain once a consensus has been built for the same. This proposal aims to build institutional and individual capacity in data management, training young scientists in data quality control and data mining techniques, and developing and deploying new methodologies to share their data effectively and efficiently for cross-site comparisons.