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Comment & Analysis
17th February 2026 | Spotlight
Spotlight has unveiled a new tuberculosis (TB) dashboard and graph generator. We hope this dashboard will help people get a clearer picture of the state of South Africa’s TB epidemic – an epidemic that still claims over 50 000 lives a year.
Spotlight’s new TB dashboard and graph generator follows on the launch of a similar HIV dashboard last November. Both of Spotlight’s dashboards show estimates from the latest versions of the Thembisa mathematical model. Thembisa is Spotlight’s preferred source for most HIV and TB numbers. We thank the Thembisa team for sharing their data.
Where the new dashboard fits in
We see Spotlight’s TB dashboard as complementary to another TB dashboard that was launched by the National Institutes for Communicable Disease (NICD) last year. This is because the dashboards contain different types of information about TB in South Africa.
The Thembisa outputs shown on the Spotlight dashboard are modelled estimates. In short, the model crunches numbers from several sources (including the type of data in the NICD dashboard) to triangulate estimates of various key indicators.
Such mathematical modelling is the best tool we have to estimate the things we are not measuring directly. For example, routine data sources can only tell us about people who have been tested for TB – it can’t tell us how many people there are out there who have TB, but have not been diagnosed. Thus, if you want to know how many people fell ill with TB in South Africa last year, your best bet is to look at modelled estimates such as those produced by Thembisa or by the World Health Organization (WHO).
By contrast, the NICD dashboard contains near real-time data on indicators such as TB testing, with detail down to district level. It thus provides an excellent view of what is happening in the health system right now, to the extent to which it is being measured. It could, for example, be used to identify districts in which TB testing rates have unexpectedly dropped.
The more transparency the better
The launch of the NICD’s TB dashboard last year is unequivocally a step in the right direction. It is also encouraging that the NICD last year responded positively to a request for health data from GroundUp News and Spotlight. This request was made in terms of the Protection of Access to Information Act.
We hope the momentum continues and that the NICD will start publishing even more data on a routine basis, including by producing an HIV dashboard similar to the one they’ve done for TB. It is after all public data, and as long as it is limited to province, district, or sub-district level, there is no risk of anyone’s private data being exposed.
More transparency and easier access to reliable health numbers from sources such as Thembisa and the NICD makes it easier for researchers to study what is going on with the health of people in South Africa. It can also help policy-makers and health system managers to respond more swiftly to problems, assist members of parliament and civil society to hold health departments accountable, and enable the media to present a more accurate and grounded view of healthcare issues.
In this age of misinformation and spin, such clarity and transparency is vital.
You can see Spotlight’s new TB dashboard here.
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