The International Center for Equity in Health (ICEH) maintains a living repository designed to organize, standardize, and disseminate health-related indicators derived from population-representative household surveys. Its primary objective is to facilitate analyses that are comparable across countries and over time, with a clear focus on health inequalities.
The repository includes health indicators calculated from microdata obtained from household health surveys, primarily from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) and Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS) programs, as well as selected country-specific national surveys. Only nationally representative surveys with publicly available data are included. These surveys employ stratified, multi-stage sampling designs, ensuring representativeness at the national level and, in most cases, by urban and rural areas and major subnational units, typically at the first administrative level.
All indicators included in the ICEH Repository are calculated directly from microdata, following standardized definitions adopted by international agencies such as the World Health Organization (WHO), UNICEF, the World Bank, or the United Nations. Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) indicators that can be calculated from the surveys are estimated using the official definitions provided on the SDG indicator metadata website. For each indicator, a single operational definition is consistently applied across all surveys to maximize comparability over time and across contexts, while also accounting for country-specific nuances.
The estimation of the indicators accounts for the full sample design of each survey, including clustering, sample weights, and stratification. For each estimate, the repository records the unweighted and weighted sample sizes, the standard error, and the confidence interval.
The indicators cover a wide range of topics related to reproductive, maternal, newborn, child, and adolescent health, as well as nutrition, water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH), mortality, fertility, gender, and composite measures. Depending on the indicator, results may be expressed as proportions, means, scores, or rates. For more information on the indicators included in the ICEH repository, please visit this link.
A defining feature of the ICEH Repository is the extensive disaggregation of indicators across multiple equity dimensions. These include socioeconomic position (measured by wealth quintiles and deciles), urban or rural area of residence, woman’s education, woman’s age, subnational units, and child’s sex.
Socioeconomic position is assessed using the wealth index precalculated in DHS and MICS surveys. The index is constructed from information on household assets and dwelling characteristics using principal component analysis. To improve comparability between urban and rural populations, the methodology involves separate analyses by area of residence followed by a harmonization step to generate a unified wealth distribution.
Education categories follow the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED) definitions and are subsequently grouped into three or four standardized classifications for analysis. Additional details on the equity dimensions included in the ICEH Repository are available here.
The construction and maintenance of the repository rely on an analytical platform developed by the ICEH, which enables the simultaneous processing of multiple surveys. Unlike data harmonization approaches that rely on fixed variable mappings, the platform addresses differences in variable categories or varying sets of variables using a flexible code that accounts for each survey's particularities. The analytical workflow is organized into three main stages: pre-analysis, analysis, and post-analysis.
The repository is updated regularly, typically every three to four months, in line with the release of new surveys or revised microdata. In addition to incorporating newly available surveys, each update may include reanalysis and corrections of existing indicators. When international organizations revise and implement standard indicator definitions, all surveys are reanalyzed to either update existing indicators or create harmonized variants that align with the revised definitions.
The ICEH Repository is openly available through the ICEH Retriever, an online data extraction platform that enables users to access and download estimates from standardized indicators, their equity-disaggregations, and accompanying metadata in user-friendly formats. This model promotes transparency, reproducibility, and broad access to high-quality health equity data for researchers, policymakers, and practitioners worldwide.
Data quality is ensured through systematic validation procedures, detailed documentation of methodological decisions, and continuous review of estimates across surveys and over time. These processes include cross-checks against official survey reports, internal consistency assessments, and trend evaluations to identify potential anomalies.
A key feature of the ICEH Repository is that indicator estimates are systematically revised and recalculated retrospectively when standard definitions are updated by international organizations. This backward recalculation ensures that complete indicator time series remain fully comparable across countries and over time, addressing a common limitation of repositories that apply revised definitions only prospectively.
In addition, the availability of ready-to-use, rigorously validated estimates substantially reduces the time and technical burden required for equity analyses. By relying on standardized estimates produced through a transparent and quality-controlled process, users can avoid common sources of error that may arise when recalculating indicators directly from microdata, particularly in the context of complex survey designs and evolving indicator definitions.
By compiling survey-based estimates with extensive disaggregation across multiple equity dimensions and applying rigorous, standardized methodological practices, the ICEH Repository serves as a key global resource for monitoring health inequalities and supporting evidence-informed, equity-oriented policy making.