Geospatial Microplanning for Neglected Tropical Disease

Each year, health programs across Africa mobilize tens of thousands of local volunteers to deliver preventive medicines. These large-scale campaigns protect millions of people in areas impacted by neglected tropical diseases—hard-hitting illnesses that most people have never heard of. Success depends on delivering enough medicine, in enough locations, for enough years to stop transmission. The real challenge is figuring out what “enough” looks like.

How many villages are affected? Where are they located? How many people live there, and how long does it take to get to them? This data is especially hard to come by in Sub-Saharan Africa. Population estimates may rely on outdated census information, while usable maps can be scarce, hand-drawn, or require expensive modeling. With few other options, many health programs turn to rough sketches that make it hard to make sure no community is overlooked.

Throughout 2025, with support from The Gates Foundation, Crosscut will be helping countries tackle these high-level organizational obstacles head-on. Our team is providing support to the World Health Organization AFRO Region's Expanded Special Program for Elimination of Neglected Tropical Diseases (ESPEN). By embedding our geospatial microplanning technology into the ESPEN portal, we plan to expand catchment area mapping capabilities so that health planners can allocate life-saving resources more effectively.

The Impact of This Work

For those unfamiliar with microplanning, it's the process of creating detailed, delivery-level operational plans to reach specific populations. Whether you're planning vaccination campaigns, distributing resources (like bednets), or determining health facility coverage areas, effective microplanning requires understanding your target populations and how to reach them efficiently.

The challenge? Traditional microplanning often relies on hand-drawn maps and best guesses about population distribution. As we saw in Ghana, this can lead to missed communities, inefficient resource allocation, and gaps in coverage. Our technology helps solve this by allowing users to easily create accurate catchment area maps in minutes, visualize population patterns, and optimize resource distribution based on geographic data.

Expanding Access Through ESPEN

Crosscut uses the latest publicly available data sources to create catchment area maps. These maps account for population density and distribution, elevation and ground cover, roads and waterways, administrative boundaries, and other relevant factors to create high-fidelity boundary maps that clarify which communities are covered by which distribution teams.

Through this work, we'll be:

1. Making the ESPEN Microplanner (powered by Crosscut's technology) freely available to public health programs across 43 African countries
2. Enabling users to analyze travel time and population heatmaps to identify hard-to-reach settlements
3. Providing tools to benchmark population estimates against multiple sources, including WorldPop, GRID3, and others
4. Providing an easy-to-use tool to help campaign planners stay organized as they collect key community-level target population estimates from throughout the health system
5. Creating seamless integration with DHIS2 and other common platforms requested by users to ensure the data gets to where it needs to go.

What excites me most is that these enhancements will help health programs reach more people and end disease transmission across the continent. This builds on our work with The Carter Center, where our technology helped refine target population estimates in Haiti’s campaign against lymphatic filariasis, prompting a shift from fixed-point to door-to-door distribution in certain areas.

Making Microplanning Tools More Accessible

While many organizations understand the value of data-driven geographic analysis, they often lack the technical expertise or resources to implement it effectively. With the Crosscut App, we've transformed what was once a complex, expert-only process into a user-friendly application that makes sophisticated spatial analysis accessible to non-technical users.

Throughout the year, we’ll refine features based on real-world feedback. This includes piloting new capabilities with health ministries and on-the-ground partners. We’re also rolling out features that include sub-district (sub-implementation unit) boundary modeling so that health teams can target their interventions to maximize impact and reduce over- or under-administering treatments. 

For DHIS2 users, you may already be familiar with our work. In 2022, our microplanning application was a finalist for DHIS2 App-of-the-Year for its ability to create catchment area maps for any sites (health facilities, communities, etc.) held in DHIS2. Since then, we've deepened our integration with DHIS2 through a signed memorandum of understanding with the HISP Center at the University of Oslo. In 2023, more than 50 Ministry of Health staff across multiple countries were trained to generate catchment areas using our tool.

Looking Forward 

The ESPEN Microplanner integration is just one way to use our catchment area mapping technology. Crosscut can help with supply chain planning, service delivery optimization, or any other effort that depends on accurate geographic reach. The technology is free to use, and we're seeing innovative uses across sectors beyond Global Health. If you’re facing sticky supply chain, geospatial, or data analytics challenges, our advisory services combine deep technical expertise with practical field experience. But at our core, we're committed to making geospatial tools accessible to global health stakeholders and everyone who needs them.

Stay tuned for updates as we roll out new features over the coming year. As always, you can try our current application at crosscut.io - no technical know-how required.