Policy document
Assessing healthy longevity in low- and middle-income countries: An applied performance dashboard for India
Wu DC, Veillard J, Haldane V, Saadat S, Jha P ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-haiku-4-5-20251001This report describes a performance dashboard developed by the World Bank Healthy Longevity Initiative to monitor health, social, and economic outcomes across the life course in low- and middle-income countries. Using India as an example, the dashboard comprises 37 indicators across ten domains and assesses country performance relative to peer nations. The analysis shows India performs relatively well on obesity but lags significantly on child malnutrition indicators and female labour force participation.
Key points
- The dashboard contains 37 indicators mapped to ten domains covering demography, health, social, and economic outcomes
- India scores in the 25-75% range for most health indicators compared to other lower-middle-income countries
- India performs worse than 75% of peer countries on child stunting, wasting, and underweight
- India performs worse than 75% of peer countries on female labour force participation
- The dashboard offers a reproducible approach to measure healthy longevity performance across countries
Limitations
The report focuses on population-level monitoring and comparative performance assessment rather than explaining underlying causes of disparities or testing interventions. It does not provide guidance on how countries should act on dashboard findings to improve child or population health outcomes.
Abstract
Abstract Background: The global population is aging rapidly, contributing to major changes in disease and demographic profiles. To support low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) to address these major demographic changes, the World Bank Healthy Longevity Initiative (HLI) focuses on enhancing human capital, reducing poverty, and improving gender equality using a life-course approach. The HLI calls for strengthening of country data systems with the use of performance dashboards for monitoring and action to assess status and progress on healthy longevity and to enable comparison with peer countries. Here, we describe a novel HLI performance dashboard for LMICs with limited or moderate existing data. Methods: Building on existing indicators from internationally comparable datasets, the HLI dashboard comprises 37 indicators mapped to ten domains pertaining to demography, health, social, and economic outcomes across the life course. The indicators are selected against a set of pre-defined criteria that are outcome-focused, easy-to-measure, and based mostly on available survey data. For each indicator, the study country is assessed relative to other countries in the same World Bank income group using a scoring system of 0-100%. Results: For most HLI health indicators, India falls in the score categories of 25-<50% and 50-<75% among lower-middle-income countries. India fares better on obesity than most other lower-middle-income countries, but lags substantially on the child growth indicators of stunting, wasting, and underweight. In terms of social and economic indicators, India falls in the 50-<75% category for many of these indicators. However, it performs worse than 75% of other lower-middle-income countries in female labour force participation. Conclusions: Using India as an example, we find that the HLI dashboard offers an easily-reproducible and intuitive approach to measure performance. With improved data availability and engagement with the general public and policymakers on indicators selection, the dashboard can be adapted to monitor the key components of healthy longevity during a time of rapid demographic change in many countries.