A geographic information system (GIS) turns scattered health facility records into a single geolocated picture of a health system. Ministries of health across low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) use this picture to plan services, model access to care, and respond to epidemics. Bluesquare supports these institutions on GIS-based projects, from national georegistries to accessibility modeling to real-time epidemic mapping.
A GIS is not just a map. It is a database that links every health facility, health area, and administrative boundary to a set of coordinates, so that health data can be queried, compared, and visualized by location.
Most national health mapping projects start the same way: converting paper-based facility lists and hand-drawn boundaries into digital, GPS-referenced records. This process, known as georeferencing, gives ministries of health a verified inventory of their health geographies: health zones, health areas, and community care sites.
Once facilities are geolocated, the next step is linking that spatial layer to the national health information system (HIS), typically DHIS2. This connection lets teams generate routine maps and microplanning maps directly from clinical and logistics data, instead of maintaining maps and records separately.
Georeferencing a health system is only the first step; ministries of health also need a shared, durable registry to keep that information current.
Several Bluesquare engagements start with a request from a ministry of health to build or update a georegistry, a structured, shared repository of geographic and facility data.
Health authorities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo digitized, updated, and geolocated health maps covering health zones, health areas, and community care sites using GPS technology (Under the USAID-funded Integrated Health Program, implemented with Abt Global, from 2018 to 2025). Working alongside GRID3, the project raised the share of geolocated health facilities from 30% to about 80%. It also included QGIS training for provincial teams, accessibility modeling with AccessMod, and a public visualization platform, cartesanitairerdc.org.
Bluesquare helped design a durable georegistry that integrates health facility mapping with real-time surveillance of epidemic-prone diseases, including malaria, mpox, and Covid-19 for the COUSP project with PATH, funded by the Gates Foundation (2022 to 2025). This work supports a one health surveillance approach, where geography becomes the common reference point across disease programs.
With Dev-Afrique, Bluesquare provided technical support to the National Agency for Clinical Engineering and Digital Health (ANICNS) in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (2025) to define a national geospatial data standard for the health sector, aligned with international interoperability standards including HL7, FHIR, and the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) framework.
Mapping and registering facilities is one part of the picture; ministries of health also need to know how easily people can reach them.
Beyond locating facilities, health authorities need to understand how far communities are from care and where new services would have the greatest impact.
Bluesquare supported a 2-phase project to build Niger’s national health map with Enabel (2018 to 2022). Field teams used mobile applications built on ODK to collect GPS coordinates, while the project modeled patient travel time to health facilities and corrected the geometry of administrative boundaries at the commune and department level.
Our analyses apply the AccessMod methodology – a WHO-led open-source framework for modeling travel time to health facilities, used in dozens of countries and backed by extensive peer-reviewed research. As the developers of AccessMod’s cloud-based platform (AccessMod NG), Bluesquare has deep expertise in the underlying algorithms and can deploy them at scale through automated OpenHEXA pipelines.
Accessibility modeling applies well beyond individual health facilities, as two further projects show.
The same GIS methods, spatial databases, and mapping tools also support infrastructure and services outside clinical care.
Bluesquare developed a GIS-based monitoring and evaluation system to track pastoral infrastructure, including water points and veterinary services, across 6 countries: Burkina Faso, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Chad, and Senegal. The system runs GeoServer and GeoNode connected to a PostGIS spatial database for real-time, multi-user mapping. Learn more about this platform supporting pastoralism in the Sahel, deployed for the PRAPS 2 project with CILSS, funded by the World Bank (2023 to 2025).
With Cordaid and the World Bank (2018 to 2022), Bluesquare supported the creation of a national school map in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, integrating school facility lists into an IASO georegistry coupled with OpenHEXA.
These projects share a common foundation: an open-source ecosystem designed to make geographic data easier to manage and reuse.
Bluesquare’s GIS engagements rely on 2 complementary open-source products, IASO and OpenHEXA, alongside established GIS standards.
IASO is an open-source georegistry used to manage and validate geographic metadata and to plan vaccination and health campaigns.
For a multi-country digital toolkit funded by the Gates Foundation (2025 to 2028), Bluesquare is developing the Subnational Tailoring (SNT) and AI toolkit. Its geospatial web application, SNT Explorer, visualizes epidemiological and environmental risk layers and automates the integration of global geospatial datasets, including WorldPop, the Malaria Atlas Project, and ERA5 climate reanalysis data, through the OpenHEXA platform, in partnership with research institutions including Swiss TPH, IDM, and Imperial College London. Explore Bluesquare’s Subnational Tailoring services for more detail.
With Gavi and CHAI (2023 to 2025), Bluesquare’s team harmonized the DHIS2 configuration of the health map in Cameroon and built a georegistry for the measles vaccination campaign, later reused for polio and malaria campaigns. This kind of work illustrates how interoperability between geographic data and clinical HIS data automates routine mapping and campaign microplanning, rather than treating them as separate exercises.
Across these projects, a geographic information system proves most valuable when it is treated as shared, durable infrastructure rather than a one-time mapping exercise. Several ministries of health have also flagged the importance of transferring cloud-hosted platforms to national servers over time and strengthening in-country GIS administration capacity, so that these tools remain sustainable once external support ends.
To see how a georegistry or accessibility model could support a specific health system, explore Bluesquare’s georegistry and microplanning expertise or learn more about IASO, Bluesquare’s open-source georegistry product.
