Geospatial microplanning for malaria health campaigns

Coite Manuel

January 1, 2024

“In December 2022, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) awarded Abt Associates the PMI Evolve Project, which supports PMI and USAID missions and bureaus with the planning, implementing, and monitoring of malaria vector control programs in 21 countries.”

Crosscut is pleased to have been selected as a resource partner for this five-year project. As part of this work, Crosscut is making its geospatial planning application available to Evolve and Ministry malaria teams to estimate the supplies needed to carry out door-to-door campaigns to support indoor residual spraying and insecticide-treated net distribution. During 2023, Crosscut worked with the Evolve teams in Uganda and Ghana to adapt our geospatial planning application to support estimation of supplies for indoor residual spraying. In 2024, we are enhancing the application to further support bed net distribution and expanding access to ten countries.

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This project has solidified our belief that it is imperative to be crystal clear on who the user of a technology is if you want to create something of actual value as a digital tool in Global Health. This seems obvious, but it is often overlooked. We are engineers by nature and if you are like us, it can be easy to want to generate complex visualizations that are really cool looking as an end into itself. However, if we’re honest, a bar chart often does the trick much better for a much wider audience.

As part of our work on this project, we worked directly with the Ghana and Uganda teams through multiple design sessions and user testing to make sure we got this part right. We aimed to remain crystal clear on who the user is and aimed to make something dead simple to use.