minicomputers are increasingly available at declining 

 costs, and mechanisms for facilitating their use should 

 be encouraged. The resulting rapid feedback of 

 information to operational levels could improve 

 supervision and evaluation of program performance and 

 would promote an appreciation of the importance of data 

 among those who must generate them in the first place. 



7. Policy Planning and Basic Data Systems 



Effective planning and an improved data base are 

 essential for successfully implementing the initiatives 

 proposed in other parts of this report. 



Policy Planning 



Population, health, and nutrition programs are 

 closely linked in many settings and should usually be 

 coordinated. This means creating, on a national basis, 

 planning units in these and related fields with 

 competence in economic analysis, quantitative planning 

 technologies, management and administrative 

 technologies, and sectoral technical expertise. A need 

 for such a unit in the population field was enunciated 

 in paragraph 95 of the World Population Plan of Action 

 (U.N. Economic and Social Council 1974) : 



Population measures and programmes should be 

 integrated into comprehensive social and 

 economic plans and programmes and this 

 integration should be reflected in the goals, 

 instrumentalities and organizations for 

 planning within the countries. In general, it 

 is suggested that a unit dealing with 

 population aspects be created and placed at a 

 high level of the national administrative 

 structure and that such a unit be staffed with 

 qualified persons from the relevant 

 disciplines. 



A social development and planning unit of the type 

 suggested would draw on and relate to planning staffs 

 within individual ministries or single- sector 

 institutions such as a ministry of health. Its chief 

 function would be to apply an integrated systems 

 approach to analysis of development problems, programs, 

 and policies, and to the implied needs to gear these 

 more effectively to health-related goals. 



In both its public and private sectors, the United 

 States has competence in assessing technologies, 

 analyzing environmental impacts, concepts of resource 



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