Table 2 A summary of programs/projects or initiatives harmonizing health facility lists (HFDB) in SSA countries. The table is ordered by UN and WHO led (accountable to member states) followed by project-based initiatives that are not directly affiliated with any government or member states

WHO-AFRO

WHO-AFRO houses a static, open access, web-based HFDB of over 85,000 public health facilities across different years. Its attributes include ID, administrative unit, facility name, type, and ownership, available to the public [79]

GHFD

WHO, under its Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Centre for Health, motivated by filling the data gaps witnessed during the COVID-19 pandemic, launched an ambitious effort—GHFD—in March 2022 [5]. Through seven strategic pathways, the initiative seeks to provide support for developing a georeferenced HFDB per country that is maintained, actively used, and publicly shared by respective Ministries of Health (MoH). Countries through MoH will maintain and regularly update their HFDB; elements of these lists will then be shared as a global public good through the ministry’s website, which will be referenced in a global directory. It will include unique identifier, name, type, and location, but countries are flexible to add other data elements. The initiative has yet to provide the directory. Two and half years since it was launched, it remains a massive task if all member states are to be in a position to regularly update their HFDB by 2027 with all necessary mechanisms in place

Humanitarian Data Exchange-HDX

HDX is a global, open access data sharing platform by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. It includes geocoded health facilities from various sources and specific countries [25, 80] covering different years

GeoPoDe

Like HDX, GeoPoDe is an open access web data repository for geospatial datasets available by country (21 in SSA) across different years including geocoded health facilities, now under the ownership of WHO. Data are available for non-profit or humanitarian applications [81]

Healthsites.io and OpenStreetMap (OSM)

The Global Healthsites Mapping Project is building a baseline of health facility data with OSM [30]. It is an open-source Digital Public Good with support for OSM and interoperability between information systems. It supports MoH in maintaining health facility data and enables multiple stakeholders to collaborate on a shared database [33]. It leads data validation through its Emergency Health Mapping Campaign by building trust between local communities, governments, and health authorities [78]. As of August 2024, it had 78,594 sites, including pharmacies in the public and private sectors in Africa. A small proportion have details about the capacity and services [14]. The data is available under an open data license and is accessible through healthstes.io, OpenStreetMap.org, and HDX

Google Maps

Like OSM, Google Maps relies on volunteered geographic information, in addition to publicly available or licensed third-party data, to provide a global open data, geocoded HFDB of public and private facilities across different years [82, 83]. It is updated and had 214,052 hospitals and medical centers globally, with 73,365 in low and lower middle-income countries in 2022 [83]. In 2023, only 53% of facilities in healthsites.io were available in Google Maps across the globe, with most facilities mapped for higher-income countries [83]

GRID3

Since 2017, The Geo-referenced Infrastructure Demographic Data for Development (GRID3) has been helping governments in SSA make better use of spatial data in healthcare among other sectors [84]. Notably, it has facilitated assembly of open access, geolocated facility lists in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, Zambia, and the Sierra Leone. However, these lists contain minimal attributes of service availability and capacity. In 2021, GRID3 is one of the organizations supporting the WHO with the coordination and implementation of the GHFD initiative in the Africa Region

KEMRI-WTRP

The Kenya Medical Research Institute-Wellcome Trust Research Programme (KEMRI-WTRP) compiled a pioneering but static (2012–2018) database of 98,745 public facilities [25] in 50 SSA countries. The list was made open data to incentivize countries and stakeholders to update and further validate the list [25]. The list has been utilized widely by researchers and stakeholders across the globe for research (cited over 200 times in Google Scholar) and implementation in SSA [25]. It is yet to be updated 6 years after its publication [14, 80]