The Health Geolab Collaborative is concentrating its efforts in Asia and the Pacific, more specifically on the 30 low- and middle-income countries listed and represented in the following map:
The Health GeoLab Collaborative uses the 4Ts (Training, Tooling, Testing, Teaming) approach to strengthen in-country capacity for a proper and sustainable geo-enablement of the Health Information System (HIS).
The strategy followed by the Members of the Collaborative to reach this objective across Asia and the Pacific is to:
- Prioritize one-on-one in-country capacity strengthening activities adjusted to the country’s specific needs and capacities.
- Provide longer term “coaching” as part of pilot projects instead of one-off training events.
- Use regional gathering mainly to cover concepts and processes and allow countries to share their experience and knowledge as well as identify common needs and challenges.
- Facilitate the organization of software specific training with professionals when needed.
- Develop and maintain freely accessible reference and training material through its knowledge repository.
- Establish public-private partnership aiming at facilitating access to geospatial technologies. and
- Develop a network of professionals dealing with the management and use geospatial data and technologies across the Region.
Through the assistance being provided, the health sector benefits from a more effective management and use of geospatial data and technologies to support geographically based decision making across health programs and reach a more systemic approach to solving public health problems and therefore the health SDG.