This diary is a collaboration between Ibrahim and Nombuso.
As part of the open humanitarian mapping community working group mentorship programme, all mentees were asked to produce a legacy project. As Nombuso wanted to work on data that would benefit women and girls in Eswatini and Ibrahim wanted to improve his technical skills, we decided to collaborate on one joint project.
Choosing eSwatini health data as the focus of our project.
We know that good quality health data is an asset for women and girls (to be able to find where there are services, when facilities are open and how far they might be away). So we decided to investigate how well OpenStreetMap provided information on these services for map users. First, we tried to download and consolidate all of the health data in OSM (amenity=hospital, clinic and doctors).
We found 39 data points for health centres in the OSM data using overpass turbo. Then we needed something to compare it to and we got the list of all health centres in eSwatini from the government web site but the biggest challenge was that the list was not geo-located. We tried to match the names with the OSM data set, so we could understand which of the facilities on the government list we already had on OSM.
Ibrahim and Pete found that some health centres were already on OpenStreetMap, but needed Nombuso’s local knowledge to match some of the names as the health facilities are referred to in different ways by different people. A large chunk of them were not on OSM. And even those that we found did not have important details like the services they provide and when they are open or closed or the number and type of doctors available in the clinics/hospitals. This was seen as a gap that could be filled through mapping and research on the Internet.
Trying to add missing data to OSM
To get the missing facility into OSM, we first tried to ask friends and family to get the coordinates whenever they were going to the clinic. Unfortunately some didn’t know how to share their locations, so this wasn’t very successful. Then Nombuso went to some health centres to get the coordinates and then sent them to Ibrahim.
Ibrahim added these clinics and hospitals to OSM which was amazing. Although it’s a small fraction of the missing data, every little bit helps!