❮ Projects page American Red Cross

Spatial Analysis Project:

As part of Ebola recovery efforts, ARC has just launched a project to map ~5,000 communities within 15 km of the border regions of Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea. This spring, volunteers will use mobile data collection methods to map each community’s buildings, roads, water points, health/public resources. We are also working with government agencies and NGOs to gather secondary data about the communities.

The next steps for this project are to analyze the various datasets to determine actionable outcomes - we are interested in an fellow who can sift through, analyze, and visualize the data in order to make sense of it. Specifically, we want to understand where are the highest-priority areas for water/sanitation, health, and education interventions, and where we can focus our own recovery efforts (and encourage other NGOs to use this info for data-driven program decisions).

Data available:

On hand: census datasets, Ebola case information, heath and education facilities (including Ebola Treatment Unit locations), admin boundaries, village and hamlet locations, OSM roads

To be collected by mid-May: detailed building locations, water points and conditions of the points, more detailed and up-to-date health/education/public service locations.

Maps and Reports that will be created:

1. We would like the fellow to review data and health literature and generate a list of communities and their attributes: size, location, health and other resources, Ebola cases, isolation, proximity to other services, etc. From this list, the fellow should create a weighted index to calculate the vulnerability and priority level of each community, as well as the type of intervention (health, education, water, sanitation, etc) most needed.

2. The fellow will create maps and visualizations to show levels of vulnerability and resources across the West African border regions. We are particularly interested in having the fellow create maps of what does not exist - where are there pockets of communities lacking services and isolated from resources? What are they lacking most?

How the maps and reports will be used:

Within the American Red Cross, program teams will be using the results to make decisions about which West African communities to operate in, and what sort of interventions we should make. We will share this information with other Red Cross societies and NGOs and advocate for them to use it, as well.