Reading: Metrics

Metrics: What counts in global health
Adams, Vincanne, editor.  Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.

This volume evaluates the accomplishments, limits, and consequences of using quantitative metrics in global health. The contributors provide a set of ethnographies about the ways in which numbers and measurement are practiced in Global Health, from the estimation of maternal mortality rates in Malawi, to the tensions surrounding the Senegalese health workers strike over data retention.  These case studies show how healthcare has been transformed by new forms of Global Health governance and warn against the consequences of a regimen in which data production overshadows actual healthcare provision.