Giving Compass' Take:

• News Deeply explores the gaps in global health data, specifically when it comes to gender. The example given is how few young girls receive treatment for anemia in India, despite a country-wide epidemic.

• How can healthcare providers and advocates improve the modes of collecting and using data around the world with a gender lens? It should start with getting more women into leadership roles.

• Here's more on why gender equality and development must become priorities.

Sapna Singh, a wide-eyed teenage girl from rural Uttar Pradesh, India, used to grow dizzy and faint as many as six or seven times per month. The dizzy spells seemingly struck at random, she says, forcing her to miss days at school, from which she has since dropped out.

Singh’s health has finally begun to improve in the last year, thanks to a woman who runs the local Anganwadi, a rural women and children’s health center. She told Singh she seemed to be suffering from anemia, or khoon ki kami (lack of blood) in Hindi, and prescribed her weekly iron and folic acid (IFA) supplements. Phoolkumari Singh, the Anganwadi worker, tracks her consumption of the supplements in a wide record book with a pink cover and pages with cartoons describing symptoms of anemia.

“Now, I can work more than before, and get less tired than before,” says Sapna Singh. She says the supplements have given her strength for tasks she once struggled to complete, including cooking, fetching water and helping with farm labor in her village. This energy is particularly important in their village of Adampur Barethi, which sits amid wheat fields dotted with mango, guava and papaya trees.

Singh is lucky; millions of adolescent girls across India do not get the benefit of this simple and inexpensive intervention.

Since 2013, the Indian government has spent upwards of $54 million on its Weekly Iron and Folic Acid Supplementation program for 100 million adolescents, recognizing that over half of Indian girls aged 10 to 19 are anemic, along with 30 percent of boys.

But as with many health programs, while the intentions may be noble, the data and implementation are lacking.

Read the full article about the gender disparity in global health data by Alia Dharssi at News Deeply.