### Summary box Infectious diseases place an unacceptable and disproportionate social and economic burden on low-income countries. National disease control programmes have the difficult task of allocating limited budgets for interventions across regions of their countries, based on often disparate datasets of varying quality from a range of sources including clinics, hospitals, village health workers, the private sector and non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Every stage of the data collection and analysis pipeline for surveillance systems may be affected by a lack of capacity as well as by biases and misaligned incentives for reporting and managing data. Addressing these issues will be essential for effective reduction in the burden of endemic infectious diseases globally as well as to preparing for emerging epidemic threats. Meanwhile, academic researchers—often in high-income settings—are developing increasingly sophisticated methods to collect and analyse data to improve spatial estimates of disease burden using new Big Data sources, mobile-Health or m-Health approaches or mechanistic and statistical modelling techniques. While these advances leap ahead, however, many remain most useful for estimating global disease distribution,1 rather than for national control programme prioritisation. Translating these new techniques …