'The false reporter will get a praise and the one who reported truth will be discouraged': a qualitative study on intentional data falsification by frontline maternal and newborn healthcare workers in two regions in Ethiopia.

Our finding suggests that to reduce facility level data falsification policy makers might consider disentangling reward and punishments from the performance reports based on the routine HMIS data. Further studies examining the high-level drivers of falsification at regional, national and global levels and effective interventions to address the drivers of data falsification are needed.