Creating a Minimum Data Set on ageing in sub-Saharan Africa

The World Health Organisation, together with representatives of four sub-Saharan African countries (Ghana, South Africa, Tanzania, Zimbabwe) and other stakeholders, launched a project in 1999 to establish a Minimum Data Set on ageing and older persons in Africa. The project focusses on identifying what data are needed to build knowledge on the situation of older Africans and forging the centralised, in-country collation and dissemination of this information. This paper summarises the current state of the project and touches on issues of data availability and quality, while exploring methods for data collection, integration, collation and dissemination