Standard validated indicators that have been recommended by normative agencies exist and should be used as appropriate for monitoring child health outcomes.

Vertical child health monitoring and evaluation approaches can distort the prioritization of health issues at the country level and may skew national resource allocation.

A focus on building country capacity to improve child health data collection and analysis can minimize the need for complex statistical methods to estimate national values.

Child survival has improved dramatically over the past 2 decades through a variety of targeted interventions.1,2 Yet, for 54 countries, achieving the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) for mortality among children aged younger than 5 years of at least as low as 25 deaths per 1,000 live births by 2030 remains out of reach. Meanwhile, for other countries that have achieved the goal, the child health agenda has shifted from survival to areas such as early childhood development, injuries, and noncommunicable diseases.3 The divide between countries that are meeting survival targets and those left behind has prompted a reevaluation of approaches to improving child health and well-being, including monitoring and measurement efforts.3–5 The diverse programming needs of countries have produced a steady increase in the number of organizations collecting and reporting on data to monitor child health and well-being.3 Although these efforts have helped raise the visibility of child health, they have inadvertently contributed to nonstandard data collection approaches and widespread use of inconsistently defined indicators, which has made tracking the global progress of child health over time and within and across countries challenging.6

Advocacy for better understanding and use of data, as well as improving data availability and quality, has been an ongoing refrain in the maternal, newborn, child, and adolescent health space over the years.3–9 …