Description of Session
Geospatial data are more and more available in low- and middle-income countries. Thanks to advanced methodologies - based on satellite imagery, remote sensing and modeling - population data are more and more available and accurate. Initiatives like Worldpop (https://www.worldpop.org/) and GRID3 (http://grid3.org/) provide key support to making that possible. In parallel, information about health facilities (e.g. geolocation, available services, type, contact) are collected by a wide range of partners. These data are highly valuable to - amongst others - improve coverage estimates, detect gaps in service availability and population accessibility to basic health care. However, they remain critically underused in many countries. Why? -Geospatial data are not structured at national level: data collections are often inconsistent with the national standards (e.g. instance health facility IDs) or in some cases these standards are not available; -Stakeholders do not have the necessary technical solutions to keep facility data updated; and -Geospatial data management capacities are limited outside the initiatives listed above. In this session, we will discuss the challenges that we faced in making geospatial data and their analysis available to decision makers in a number of countries and the approaches (both technical and organizational) that we have developed to overcome these challenges. We will address how we dealt with questions such as -How to set up and maintain a health facility registry? -How to compute better coverage estimates? -How to identify health facilities with accessibility issues? -How to improve the administrative boundaries based on actual healthcare usage and referral processes in the field? We will discuss technical tools, governance, national standards and best practices.
