The Uncounted
Politics of Data in Global Health

It humanizes high-level debates over indicators and data in development aid, showing how they are used to make life-or-death decisions.

Sara L.M. Davis (Author)

9781108704830, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 1 October 2020

319 pages, 19 b/w illus. 6 tables
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm, 0.479 kg

'The book is wide in scope and deep in breadth … The Uncounted offers an important window into AIDS governance, opening up ways to study power and the construction of regimes of truth that shape our contemporary world. It should become a must-read book for those academics and activists willing to get their head around the system of AIDS knowledge as well as the social and semantic spaces and new sets of relations that it sets in motion.' Julie Billaud, PoLAR Online

In the global race to reach the end of AIDS, why is the world slipping off track? The answer has to do with stigma, money, and data. Global funding for AIDS response is declining. Tough choices must be made: some people will win and some will lose. Global aid agencies and governments use health data to make these choices. While aid agencies prioritize a shrinking list of countries, many governments deny that sex workers, men who have sex with men, drug users, and transgender people exist. Since no data is gathered about their needs, life-saving services are not funded, and the lack of data reinforces the denial. The Uncounted cracks open this and other data paradoxes through interviews with global health leaders and activists, ethnographic research, analysis of gaps in mathematical models, and the author's experience as an activist and senior official. It shows what is counted, what is not, and why empowering communities to gather their own data could be key to ending AIDS.

1. Contested indicators
2. The uncounted: Key populations
3. "Something more than data”
4. Cost-effectiveness and human rights
5. Modeling the end of AIDS
6. Sustainability, transition and crisis
7. Listening to women
8. "So many hurdles just to leave the house"
9. The Panopticon and the Potemkin
10. Data from the ground up.

Subject Areas: Law & society [LAQ], Law [L], Comparative politics [JPB], Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography [JHMC], Sociology & anthropology [JH]