Eliminating malaria through mapping
Last year, Visualize No Malaria, a partnership between Zambia’s Ministry of Health, PATH, Tableau Foundation, and a coalition of tech partners, mapped 99% of buildings in Livingstone District, Zambia to help make the country malaria-free by 2020. In just two months, volunteers from all over the world contributed to the map, directly contributing to malaria elimination efforts.
Visualize No Malaria recently kicked off phase two of its mapping effort to support Zambia’s malaria elimination. You can be a part of this mission too by tracing buildings from the satellite imagery provided by DigitalGlobe, and uploading it to OpenStreetMap. Check out Visualize No Malaria’s blog post for a step-by-step walk through to get involved.
Meanwhile, the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team and DigitalGlobe have teamed up to identify and map populated places in over 500,000 square kilometers of Southern Africa, Southeast Asia, and Central America to support the Clinton Health Access Initiative’s malaria program. This area completely overlaps with the focus area of Visualize No Malaria, and the next phase of mapping addresses the needs of both PATH and the Clinton Health Access Initiative. Working together in OpenStreetMap, it’s simple to collaborate and map together to create more data faster.
Using OpenStreetMap data and geographical factors like elevation, rainfall, and temperature data, the Visualize No Malaria team creates models to predict the likely location and timing of malaria outbreaks, and scale up interventions for prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and surveillance of malaria.
We’re looking forward to continue working with and supporting this important project. Find out more ways you can get involved on PATH’s blog post.
