Each year, around 10 million children receive no vaccinations at all. More than fifty percent of these zero-dose children live in urban slums, remote communities, and conflict environments. We developed a framework to help find them using geospatial analysis.

We developed a geospatial dashboard to support the Federal Ministry of Health (FMoH) and Regional Health Bureaus (RHBs) of Ethiopia to identify and target zero-dose communities, based on innovative data analyses.

This enables managers to nuance health services across and within regions, based on the proximity of local populations to health facilities that provide immunisation (EPI-HFs). For example, the graphs below show the importance of prioritising outreach activities in the Afar region, or the East Wollega Zone in the Oromia region, with 49% and 45% of the population in these areas living farther than five kilometres from the nearest EPI-HF respectively.

The dashboard also provides managers with a visual overview of probable under-served or ‘zero-dose’ communities.

Managers can use this tool to visualise likely ‘zero-dose’ communities. For example, the village of ‘Getama’ can be visualised, which is 64 km away from the nearest EPI-HF and likely to be home to many ‘zero dose’ children.

We are working with officials across Ethiopia to use this analysis as a part of planning activities to ensure that all children in villages like Getema receive all their required vaccinations.

A similar approach is used in Afghanistan, with geospatial analysis being used to revise EPI service-delivery activities to 45,000 villages across Afghanistan. Acasus developed ‘outreach information packs’ for managers, providing them with an overview of ‘outreach priority’ villages in each district, as well as the nearest EPI-HF to serve them.

Additional mapping visuals provide further clarity, showing proposed EPI-HFs to serve each ‘outreach priority’ village, as well as road networks, rivers, and topography. This also provides managers with insights on likely ‘zero-dose’ communities for each district. 

This approach is also used to inform the approach to deliver the Covid-19 vaccine in Afghanistan.

At the request of the President, Acasus leveraged geospatial analysis to identify and visually present the location of schools located over 2 km-s away from Covid-HFs in Kabul province. We use this analysis to plan outreach activities to vaccinate teachers from remote schools as part of new campaigns to vaccinate school teachers and university staff.

Advanced geospatial analysis can provide managers with simple, easy-to-use, and accurate insights to improve service delivery, target zero-dose communities and inform Covid-19 vaccination activities.