Where is the next health center? What areas show less accessibility to health centers and are therefore the most vulnerable?
In 2018, the openrouteservice team already illustrated how these questions related to vulnerability can be addressed with openrouteservice APIs, at that time for disaster prone regions in Madagascar. Learn more here.
Also at that time our Missing Maps partners from CartONG and 510/ Netherland Red Cross conducted a project in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Malawi regarding a “data collaborative” to measure Sustainable Development Goals, in which the openrouteservice API was again put to use to assess the accessibility of health centers.
The project specifically addressed SDG 3.8 “Achieve universal health coverage, including financial risk protection, access to quality essential health-care services and access to safe, effective, quality and affordable essential medicines and vaccines for all” and mainly focused on assessing locations and accessibilty of essential health services.
Tasks included assessment of existing health data, health data collection to address identified gaps and development of a data model and sharing mechanisms to enable easier access and merging of already available and collected data to OpenStreetMap - and to make it openly available for everyone to benefit.
Project outcomes included a comprehensive data set and overviews of health center locations. Thanks to the openrouteservice APIs, these could directly be put to use in prototype dashboards to conduct dynamic accessibility analyses and to help identify vulnerable areas.
For further information, see the full report by CartONG.
RDC Health Accessibility Dashboard