AIDS Program Effort Index (API)
Posted on May 8th, 2006 by joshbusby
This index tracks the level of effort countries have dedicated to combatting AIDS in their country. It’s a bit like the Transparency International Index, surveying practitioners to get their sense of the level of effort countries have dedicated to combatting the disease. Here is the summary from a website where the report is available:
This report presents the results of the 2003 round of the AIDS Program Effort Index (API). The API was developed by UNAIDS, USAID, and the Policy Project to measure programme effort in the response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. It is designed to provide a current profile of national effort and a measure of change over time. The API was first applied to 40 countries in 2000, and a revised index was applied in 54 countries in early 2003.
Results of the 2003 round include:
- programme effort is relatively high in the areas of political support, policies, and planning with average scores above 70% of the maximum effort
- prevention programmes and the legal and regulatory environment are the next most highly rated components with scores between 60% and 70%
- the human rights component received the lowest score
- respondents reported that legal structures are in place to protect human rights but that resources and enforcement efforts are lacking
- resource availability and mitigation effort also received low scores
- by region, Eastern and Southern Africa has the highest overall scores
- West and Central Africa and Asia also scored relatively high, with Latin America and the Caribbean and Eastern Europe somewhat lower
- the average score for all countries increased slightly from 56% in 2000 to 61% in 2003
- the largest increases were for political support, resources, and care and treatment
Filed under: Resources
[…] I did want to discuss one thing here though. To compare the countries in her case studies, Patterson uses the Aids Programme Effort Index (API). The API is a survey instrument that is intended to reflect the country’s level of effort on AIDS on a number of criteria such as political support and legal/regulatory environment. A handful of experts knowledgeable about the different criteria were consulted in each country, generating a score on a 100-point scale for each criteria and overall score. South Africa, for example, scored a 75 on the 2003 API, similar to Uganda (76) and less than Botswana (80) and Rwanda (81). Swaziland and Zimbabwe got a 60 and 61. In reading up on the API, which has gone through three iterations since 1999, I found that the average number of experts surveyed for each of the criteria was four people. The result is that you get something sixteen people consulted per country. Somehow, I wonder if the scores that are generated have any cross-country generalizability. I have very strong doubts. I know that data limitations make it very hard to do this kind of work, but when Patterson ultimately concludes that there is no overarching explanation for differences in country behavior on AIDS policies, I wonder if she’d reach the same conclusions if we had a had better measure of country effort on AIDS. […]