Disclosure of PEPFAR data would improve program's efficiency, quality, accountability

The U.S. government, and in particular U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator Ambassador Eric Goosby, the head of PEPFAR, "have a unique opportunity to make [the program's] money stretch farther and do more good, at very little cost to U.S. taxpayers: release the reams of data that PEPFAR and its contractors have already collected, at substantial cost -- perhaps as much as $500 million each year," Mead Over, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development (CGD), writes in the Center's "Global Health Policy" blog. "This would be a first step in what I hope will be [a] 2013 drive to improve the efficiency, the quality and the accountability of the U.S.'s most frequently praised foreign assistance program," he states. Over goes on to describe the Data Working Group and its recommendations to PEPFAR (11/13).