afrimapr R building-blocks for the operational COVID-19 health response

We will develop software building-blocks to facilitate the use of operational health data in Africa to aid the COVID-19 response. The main gap the new work addresses is the use and re-use of health data in the immediate operational response to COVID-19. The project will run under the umbrella of afrimapr, an existing Wellcome Open Research Fund project improving the use of health research data. The project philosophy is the same: firstly to develop open-source R components to assist African data scientists in creating tools to address local issues, secondly to develop training resources and thirdly to promote them within African data communities. We have already started assessing, and improving access to, open-data on African health facility locations. This extension will allow us to continue working with new collaborators; healthsites.io and OpenStreetMap communities that collate and crowdsource health facility data. We will reach out to African data communities through DFID advisers to African ministries, national statistics institutes through the Global Statistical Service, and our networks and social media. Components for working with African health zones will also be developed. Increasing the use of open-access health data has the co-benefit of incentivizing improvements to the availability of the data themselves.