Has She Access?

Description
In order to address the lack of tools to monitor the availability of health services in sub-Saharan Africa, the SheDecides fund, launched by Belgium and the Netherlands, supports the "Has She Access" initiative in three pilot countries: Senegal, Benin and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). This initiative consists in providing the various partners (Ministry of Health, NGOs, private partners) with a platform for monitoring the availability of family planning services (stocks of contraceptive methods, qualified personnel, equipment) in the country's health facilities in near real time, and to calculate the travel time required to access the nearest available family planning service. In the long term, this platform could also serve as a basis for the construction of an information tool for the general population, for example, to be able to request information on the health facility offering a quality family planning service near one's home. In this project, we automated geospatial workflows to calculate:

• the catchment population of each geolocated health facility (total population and population of Women of Child-Bearing Age)
• the time required for the population to travel to the nearest facility, in the wet and the dry season, accounting for a set of spatial variables (roads, terrain, land cover etc.)
• for each geolocated health facility, the catchment population per travel-time zone (isochrone).

Partners
Department of Geography - Université de Namur - Website

Funding
Research funded by the She Decides initiative.