Early in March 2020 the afrimapr team started looking into mapping, comparing,
and combining open health facility data to enable better access for decision makers in Africa during
and after the COVID-19 pandemic. The afrihealthsites package currently allows users to compare two existing continental open data sets - one developed by the Kenya Medical Research Institute
(KEMRI) in collaboration with the WHO, the second a global crowd-sourced open health facilities mapping project - healthsites.io.
afrihealthsites is under active development and input is welcome.
The aim of this aspect of the project is to work through the process of collating the best possible facility list for open data sets available for South Africa by combining various openly available resources. We acknowledge that this cannot be called the Master Facility List as we will only work with openly available data sets and do not have access to all information available to the Department of Health (beyond what is published in the Data Dictionary). As all countries have to work through this process sooner or later (and quite often more than once), we want to understand the process and see where afrimapr can aid by developing building blocks to facilitate similar processes and complimentary data analysis workflows.
If you would like to get involved in the afrimapr project, please visit our Get Involved page and get in touch!
Please cite this report as:
Anelda van der Walt, & Andy South. (2020, April 16). Merging Open Health Facility Data Sets: Part 1 (Version v1.1). Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3754647