About HealthScope

Health facility intelligence beyond static inventories.

Mission

Our mission is to make health facility access measurable, comparable, and continually updated across malaria-endemic Sub-Saharan Africa — so that ministries, researchers, and implementers plan around who can reach care, not just where facilities appear on a map.

We commit to four principles:

• Open — every dataset and method behind the portal is freely available under permissive licences, without registration.
• MoH-sourced — primary data comes directly from Ministry of Health registries, never from second-hand aggregators or opaque compilations.
• Reproducible — the ETL pipeline that produces every table, chart, and map on this site is versioned, documented, and rerunnable from source.
• Population-first — each layer of analysis is built around the people a facility is meant to serve, not just the facility itself.

The Gap We Fill

Current approaches to health facility mapping focus primarily on documenting facility locations without deeper analysis. HealthScope goes further by providing:

• Population-demand modelling – reachability analysis beyond simple location pins
• Service-level intelligence – mapping of what services exist where
• General information at scale – population-weighted access metrics and facility distribution analysis

HealthScope addresses these gaps as an open, reproducible data platform.

Intelligence Layers

1. Facility Registry Lake

Standardized facility data from MoH sources across SSA countries. Multi-country harmonized schema; direct MoH sourcing.

2. Demand-Side Access

Population catchment zones using road networks; travel-time isochrones showing not just location, but reachability.

3. Service Gap Intelligence

Which services exist where. Per-domain coverage across the registry, interactive country switching, and per-facility service profiles.

4. General Information

Country-level descriptive statistics — facility counts, type mix, ownership split — that give a fast picture of the registry without claiming reachability or access modelling we have not yet built.

ETL Pipeline

The HealthScope ETL pipeline ingests each Ministry of Health registry through three steps:

1. Extract — pull the latest country CSV / API payload (Tanzania HFR portal, Kenya KMHFR, Ethiopia MFR v2, etc.) into a country-specific raw folder.
2. Transform — standardise columns to a shared schema, validate coordinates against the country’s bounding box, mint a stable global facility UID, and map each raw service name to the canonical 7-domain hierarchy via per-country crosswalks.
3. Load — publish versioned per-country CSVs ({country}_standardized.csv for facilities, {country}_services_standardized.csv for services) that the portal consumes directly via a git submodule.

Data Sources

HealthScope ingests only authoritative, official sources — Ministry of Health master facility registries and openly-licensed compilations of the same upstream data. For the full per-country source catalogue with license and citation details, visit the dedicated page.

View Data Sources →

Team

The portal is maintained by a team of data engineers, GIS specialists, epidemiologists, and researchers at the Malaria Atlas Project Dar es Salaam Node.

Visit the Team Page →