Private Actors and the Production of Metrics in Global Health

This paper explores the role of private actors in the production of global metrics in health governance – with a specific focus on non-communicable diseases (NCDs) The global health metrics used in global health by the WHO, the World Bank or even global professional associations have been produced either for or by private actors. On the one hand, the WHO, concerned to attract private investments and private funders, sustained a governance mode in which digital data and algorithms were mobilized in order to set priorities and calculate the impact of existing interventions and eventually showcase the benefits of ‘investing’ into NCDs. On the other hand, and because they also wanted to direct their own investments where most ‘cost-effective’, philanthropic players found the production of large datasets highly appealing and created ‘data institutes’ specifically designed to produce large data and estimates. These metrics and the models with which they have been ‘calculated’ has resulted in the production of NCDs as a technical, individual, biomedical and marketable problem.