Volunteers Supported AFP Surveillance Efforts in Kenya

As part of their efforts to fight a polio outbreak in Somalia, Kenya, and Ethiopia, the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Horn of Africa polio office is monitoring cases of acute flaccid paralysis (AFP) in health facilities throughout Kenya. To facilitate this AFP surveillance, WHO needed an updated base layer containing the names and locations of all health facilities in the country. This layer will be used to populate a drop-down menu in the Open Data Kit data collection tool being used by the surveyors who visit the health facilities, resulting in a clean, consistent dataset.

During the month of May, GISCorps volunteers Kevin Otiego, Ken Kiema, Davince Koyo, and Waswa Barasa verified 4,500 health facility locations and 4,466 ISS survey visits.  Each volunteer worked on one county (Kenya’s first level administrative division) in Kenya at a time using an ArcGIS Online app.  Using ISS survey data along with other available health facility data from sources like OpenStreetMap, they verified the location, facility name, any alternate names, and the county.

The fun thing about this mission was that all four volunteers are Kenyan and were able to support their country in the fight against polio.