Bottom-Up Approach

In an initiative led by the OSM community in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), in partnership with Humanitarian OpenStreetMaps Team (HOT), health zones were mapped within existing administrative boundaries in DRC, and health areas mapped within these health zones. Health cells and health blogs were additionally mapped within each health zone. The goal of this project was to track patient origins – where they come from and how they get to health facilities. With smaller units demarcated, this made it easier to create catchment areas by arranging these units to fit the purpose or reach of the catchment area of the health intervention. Existing maps created by health and humanitarian organizations in the area were not accessible to community health workers and thus not useful to them. The decision therefore was to map these finer areas, cells, and blogs in collaboration with community health workers and to hand over these maps to them. More importantly, this method made it easier to re-arrange smaller health boundaries to fit the changing focus of health services or programmes, and the constantly changing administrative boundaries of the country. A diagrammatic representation of the health boundary demarcation for this initiative is shown as Figure 3.

Figure 3: Health boundary demarcation using the bottom-up approach (Adapted from HOT and OSM DRC Community Project)