Objectives
- Ingest country updates as soon as they are available
- Improve overall data quality
- Provide a single authoritative source of GIS data for various programs in the AFRO region
- Manage regional codes, independently from countries or headquarters
- Share boundaries and population estimates back with countries
Description
The AFRO GDB is a centralized repository that stores, manages, and provides access to official
and standardized geospatial data. It supports administrative boundaries (Health and Political),
Population data and Health Facilities within the WHO African Region (AFRO), enabling
systematic quality control to ensure data are precise, up-to-date, and consistent with local and
international standards.
The solution features the following capabilities:
- Supports uploading of geographic boundaries (polygons), health facilities (points), and
population data (tabular format) - Performs data quality checks and suggests automatic boundary corrections
- Implements a multi-level validation and approval workflow
- Allows data downloads in multiple formats
- Enables integration via web APIs with other regional systems
- Maintains a history of all changes
- Enables visualization of differences between data versions
- Sends user notifications for updates and changes
58
validation rules
4059
Health facilities
47
countries
Geographic deployment
Deployed in 47 countries, expanding to all of AFRO
Context
Before the implementation of AfroGDB, geospatial data for the WHO African Region were processed largely through manual workflows, requiring extensive human intervention to clean, harmonize, and validate administrative boundaries, population datasets, and health facility information across countries. This approach was time-consuming, error-prone, and made it difficult to consistently align national datasets with regional standards, directly impacting the timeliness and reliability of disseminated data.
AfroGDB establishes a centralized, governed geospatial database that automates data ingestion, quality control, versioning, and validation workflows within the existing ArcGIS Enterprise environment. By introducing automated QA checks, structured approval processes, and full change traceability, the platform has significantly reduced the time required to deliver quality-controlled geospatial data, while substantially lowering the manual effort previously needed to edit and harmonize datasets across countries. As a result, WHO AFRO programs now benefit from faster access to authoritative, consistent, and up-to-date geospatial data to support regional analysis, planning, and decision-making.
