Webinar : Keep your GIS data healthy !
Ce webinaire sera aussi donné en français le mardi 25 octobre 2022!
Geospatial data is increasingly used in the development sector for its ability to provide new insights and enhance decision-making. For example, it can answer questions such as: where are disease rates higher or lower? How far is the nearest healthcare facility? Where to deliver vaccines in order to reach “zero-dose children”?
As with all data, geospatial data can be wrong. And with all data, clean data is needed for good analyses. Wrong location information can lead to wrong orientation of resources, while wrong boundaries can lead to wrong estimation of aggregated information which can alter epidemiological insights.
In the context of our work across over 20 LMICs (mostly in Africa), Bluesquare handles a lot of geospatial data: from helping Ministries elaborate master facility lists to integrating spatialized climate data into malaria surveillance tools, to improving the alignment of health area boundaries to new administrative realities. We are confronted every day with the issues linked to incorrect and incoherent data. It seems important to us that local actors get a better feeling for the impact this can have, what to watch out for when evaluating spatial data and how to go about fixing some of the most obvious issues. This is what this webinar is about.
More concretely, during this webinar, we will first provide an overview of different use cases for geospatial data and how data errors influence the results of the analyses in these cases. We will then present three specific examples linked to three types data and of incoherences, showing for each type how to assess the quality and which tools and approaches to use to fix the most common errors:
- Point data such as health facilities, schools, etc: how can we verify location quality, and what types of errors can we identify?
- Single polygon layer such as administrative boundaries, health areas, etc: how can we identify internal errors to such a layer, even if they are not easily visible to the naked eye? How can we fix these errors automatically and manually?
- Two polygon layers: how to identify issues in the alignment between two different layers (e.g. admin2 within admin1) and to what extent can we solve these automatically?
Join us for a one-hour session :
About the speakers
Moritz Lennert– Geospatial Data and Health Campaign Digitization Team Lead @Bluesquare
Moritz Lennert is a geographer who brings to Bluesquare over 20 years of professional experience in applied and fundamental research and teaching in very diverse fields such as spatial information science and modeling, policy-related spatial analysis, regional development, urban and social geography, and remote sensing. He holds a PhD from the Université Libre de Bruxelles and an MSc in Globalisation and Development from Queen Mary’s, University of London. At the ULB, he created a GIS training course for professionals from LMICs. As a member of the core development team of GRASS GIS and of the OSGeo foundation, he strongly believes in the creation and use of free software and open data.
Claire Halleux– Geospatial Data Project Manager @Bluesquare
Claire Halleux has over ten years of experience as a GIS specialist. She has held the position of Technical Advisor at the World Resources Institute in DRC and GIS Coordinator at the Observatoire des Forêts d’Afrique Centrale. Before joining Bluesquare, Claire was Country Manager in DRC for the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, an international team dedicated to humanitarian action and community development through open mapping.
At Bluesquare she is in charge of supporting health mapping, data integration and digitization especially within Ministries of Health.
She holds a Master degree in Bioengineering & Environmental Sciences from the Université Catholique de Louvain in Belgium.
Junior Gildas Boko -Geospatial Engineer @Bluesquare
Junior Gildas Boko is a versatile expert with more than 10 years of professional experience in various fields such as environment, climate change, natural hazards, GIS, and remote sensing. In parallel with a consulting career started in 2006, he has also worked as a programme officer and teacher-researcher mainly in international institutions such as UNOPS, UNCCD, and FAO. Since 2015, he has been working as a GIS specialist at the Université Libre de Bruxelles and since June 2022 as a geospatial analyst at Bluesquare.
About the moderator
Valentine van den Bogaert– Geospatial Data Project Manager at Bluesquare.
Valentine van den Bogaert is an economist by training. She worked for 4 years as a tech consultant, implementing CRM tools. She collected customers’ needs and translated them into lean technological processes. She then worked for 3 years in different Belgian NGO’s, as Microfinance & Social Marketing Officer first and as Monitoring & Evaluation officer after that.
