Success Stories
WHO Tobacco Control
Turning Complex Data into Global Impact
Established in 1948, the World Health Organization (WHO) is a United Nations agency dedicated to advancing global health. It brings together countries, partners, and communities to address a wide range of health challenges, from disease prevention and control to tobacco use and other major public health risks, and to ensure everyone has the opportunity to achieve the highest possible level of health.
Industry
Product
Goals and Objectives
To develop an interactive, data-driven tobacco control platform that transforms regional tobacco control data into actionable insights, enabling policymakers, advocates, and stakeholders to truly make a difference.
- Centralize and Present Tobacco Control Data: simplify complex legislative and policy data into a consolidated, accessible, and easy-to-understand format.
- Enable Country-to-Country Comparison: provide real-time data analysis and comparison to track progress and benchmark each country against others across the Region.
- Identify Legislative Gaps and Priorities: transform raw data into clear, actionable insights that help policymakers identify gaps and strengthen the case for legislative reform.
- Turn Data into Action: connect data with real-world action, helping policymakers and stakeholders turn evidence into meaningful policy change across the Region.
Our Solution
The WHO Regional Office for Europe maintains one of the world’s most authoritative datasets on tobacco-control legislation. But the existing public database had become a liability rather than an asset: it was outdated, hard to navigate, and static. Visitors could read figures, but they could not explore, compare, or act on them.
The timing sharpened the urgency. A donor country that had not yet ratified the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (WHO FCTC) wanted to show, plainly, how far behind it had fallen on banning tobacco advertising, promotion and sponsorship (TAPS) relative to its neighbours. What the team needed was not another reference table, but a tool that could turn raw legislative data into a story, and, crucially, into action.
- Avoid Information Overload: With a large amount of data and comparisons, the platform needs to present information clearly and highlight key results without overwhelming users.
- Streamline the User Journey: Users may currently need several clicks to reach the information they need. The new direction should create a sleek, intuitive experience that delivers desired results with fewer steps.
Our Approach
Manao Software began by translating dense public-health and policy requirements into concrete user journeys. Rather than designing around the dataset, we designed around four distinct audiences and what each one needed the data to do for them.
Policymakers
& Ministry Advisers
compare their country against the Region and pinpoint the precise legislative gaps to close.
Civil society
& NGOs
build advocacy on the evidence base, identifying regional leaders and the good practices behind strong laws.
Media
find fresh, data-backed angles on a long-running public-health story.
Students
& researchers
collect, compare, and analyse country or regional data on their own terms.
Underneath the interface, the platform is structured as a modular content framework anchored in the WHO FCTC, with the architecture designed to take on new convention measures without rebuilding the experience.
The Results
- Delivered a Sleek, Practical, and Scalable Platform: a user-friendly website designed for real-world use, with a scalable structure that supports ongoing updates and the growing volume of data from 2010 onwards.
- Expanded into Phase 2: following completion of Phase 1, the project progressed into Phase 2, extending the platform’s data coverage and building on its capabilities through 2013.
Why it Matters
In the WHO European Region, only a minority of countries have comprehensively banned all forms of direct and indirect tobacco advertising, and cross-border and point-of-sale loopholes remain widespread. Closing those gaps is fundamentally a legislative task, and legislation moves on evidence. By making it effortless to see where a country stands, who leads, and exactly which provisions are missing, the database turns WHO’s authority into something policymakers can actually pick up and use.
For Manao Software, the engagement is a demonstration of where our work adds the most value: taking complex, high-stakes institutional data and shaping it into an experience that is at once credible, usable, and action-driving.
Looking Ahead
The platform was designed to grow. The roadmap WHO and Manao shaped together includes subregional and multi-country comparison, a guided “Need a Guide” tool, selective printing, an automated “Update us” form for keeping legislation current, news updates, and a community layer, extending the database from a reference tool into a living, collaborative instrument for tobacco control across the Region.
