Conclusion

“Health catchment areas are not new; they are just not in a digital form”. - Key Informant Interview

It is important to stress that the concept of health catchment areas exists already, albeit in different forms and contexts. In most cases, the villages and populations served by a health facility within an administrative district form the health catchment area of the health facility. These pre-existing classifications, as heterogeneous as they are across countries, have additionally been modified by organizations working in the health cluster, resulting in an even greater diversity of classification systems.

District boundaries are currently being used for planning and coordinating field activities for catchment areas by most civil society organizations. The World Health Organization could potentially play a supervisory role in streamlining definitions, minimum indicators, data components and metrics at the level of the health district to allow for consistency of data, as health districts overlap significantly with health catchment areas in almost all contexts. Additionally, there is a need for central coordination of data producers and repositories (OSM Community, CGR, GRID3, HDX) to ensure data quality and consistency of support to users/beneficiaries (government agencies, communities). This has been demonstrated efficiently in the digital microplanning for COVID-19 Vaccination initiative spearheaded by the UNICEF/WHO GIS working group.

The goal of the health catchment area working group and of this background document is not to inform the creation of novel data, but to outline the wide variety of methodologies and apply practices already in existence, and that are most suitable to a particular context. This will streamline the current collaborative and governance structure for creating a central registry of health catchment area spatial databases which are openly shared, utilized and maintained by all stakeholders in the health and humanitarian sectors.