Unicef’s Magic Box adds healthsites.io to kepler.gl
Kepler.gl is an open source geospatial toolbox that works in the browser. It’s great for dropping in datasets and creating a visualization to help tell a story. Unicef’s Magic Box currently uses it internally to visualize poverty and vulnerability, as well as disease spread.
Healthsites.io, lead by Mark Herringer, is an initiative to create an online map of every health facility in the world and make the details of each location easily accessible. For Unicef, knowing the locations of health facilities is useful to analyzing the equity of health care in program countries and improving supply chain.
Since adopting kepler, we have gradually connected datasets like administrative boundaries, population, and, most recently, health facilities from healthsites.io. The public version is here.
Data sources
- Admin boundaries — gadm.org, version 3.6.
- Population — generated by aggregating global UN estimates for 2015 raster by gadm36 shapefiles using python library rasterstats
- Health facilities — healthsites.io
Credits
Big thanks to Courage Angeh, a visiting software engineer who joins us remotely from Cameroon, for adding healthsites.io data, as well as my fellow developers:
- Marcella Maki
- Carlos Cardoso Dias
- Adam Rahman (visiting engineer)
… and Thoa Ta who still makes contributions since completing her internship with us last year.
Since this article also serves as a form of documentation for my team, below is a diagram that illustrates the pipeline for preparing and storing the data.
You can install or contribute to the Magic Box kepler app here. Checkout the dev branch, sample datasets are included in the public directory.
