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Managers of public health systems in developing countries have to face many constraints in their efforts to provide broad based health services to
their client population. One of the main constraints reported by WHO is the lack of adequate information for the managerial process ([WHO (1987)]).
In a decentralized district health system (comp. figure 1), which today is promoted as an adequate organizational structure for public health services
in developing countries, managers are still more or less left alone with their information needs.
Routine service data are already massively collected (comp. figure 2). But finding trends in that flood of data is as difficult as finding the chameleon in figure 3. Therefore the data are usually not analyzed.
The facilitation of personal computers is considered to be a cost-effective support for an evaluation of routine data ([BERTRAND (1988)] et al.).
However, specialized application software which is adaptable to the needs of a district is not available, although its construction is considered to be feasible([MOIDU, WIGERTZ and TRELL (1992)])
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