Open Buildings Empowering Healthcare and Innovation Across Africa
Open Buildings data is transforming healthcare delivery in Africa. By providing detailed building footprints, it enhances clinic planning and vaccine outreach prioritization in Nigeria. This dataset empowers informed decision-making, improves resource distribution, and accelerates access to healthcare services for underserved communities.
What is Open Buildings?
Created by Google Research Africa, the free Open Buildings dataset provides detailed information on more than 1.8 billion structures across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean—regions where such data was once outdated or unavailable. In 2024, a 2.5D Temporal layer was added to track how buildings change over time. This dynamic dataset supports governments, NGOs, and startups in better understanding population needs, helping them plan clinics, design infrastructure, and deliver aid more quickly and equitably.
Across Africa, Open Buildings data is already enhancing healthcare delivery. Ministries, researchers, and NGOs combine this dataset with local knowledge to identify investment priorities and target underserved populations effectively. Two recent initiatives—in Rwanda and northern Nigeria—demonstrate the powerful results when reliable data is matched with dedicated field efforts.
Rwanda: Targeting Clinics Where They Are Needed Most
Rwanda’s Ministry of Health aims to ensure every citizen lives within 30 minutes of a healthcare facility. However, the lack of accurate and current settlement maps has made planning and service delivery difficult. To address this, Sand Technologies a pan-African data science and AI company and long-time partner of the ministry leveraged the Open Buildings dataset to develop a Healthcare Investment Planning Tool. This tool calculates travel times to the nearest clinic, identifies “healthcare deserts,” and recommends optimal locations for new clinics. What once took weeks of field surveys now takes minutes, and the first clinics planned using this tool will serve tens of thousands who previously faced long, expensive trips for medical care.
Nigeria: Ensuring Life-Saving Vaccines Reach Every Child
In northern Nigeria, health workers face challenges reaching “zero-dose” children those aged 12 months and older who have yet to receive their first Penta 1 vaccine. Many of these children live in settlements absent from traditional maps. To address this, WorldPop at the University of Southampton partnered with the African Field Epidemiology Network (AFENET) Nigeria to use the Open Buildings dataset to identify these hidden communities. By combining building footprints with clinic locations and travel-time models, they achieved more precise population estimates, prioritized outreach to the most inaccessible villages, and minimized unnecessary trips.
Open Buildings supports initiatives well beyond healthcare. Renewable energy developers rely on roof counts to design solar mini-grids tailored to local needs. Disaster response teams integrate building footprints with satellite images to coordinate relief efforts for floods and storms. Urban planners use the data to study settlement patterns, helping to improve commuting, job accessibility, and housing. Each use case contributes valuable insights back to the community, continuously enhancing the dataset and giving innovators a stronger foundation to build upon.
A broader toolkit for health innovators
Open Buildings is just one part of our comprehensive health-AI toolkit. For example, travel-time data from Google Maps assists officials in Nigeria and Ghana in identifying areas where women face long journeys for emergency obstetric care, helping to optimize ambulance placement. Our Health AI Developer Foundations and Open Health Stack streamline the creation of healthcare AI models and secure, interoperable digital health applications. Additionally, our new population-dynamics foundation model offers localized insights into how communities interact with their environments, aiding in predicting disease prevalence and spread to guide public health policies and resource allocation. Together, these tools tackle various challenges, providing frontline workers with a clearer understanding of who needs care, where, and when.
If you’re a researcher, policymaker, or social entrepreneur, explore the dataset at https://sites.research.google/gr/open-buildings/. If you’re already leveraging Open Buildings or any of our health-AI tools to tackle real-world challenges, we’d love to hear from you. Share your story with us at open-buildings-dataset@google.com so we can learn from your experience and inspire others.
The post Open Buildings Empowering Healthcare and Innovation Across Africa appeared first on Tech In Africa.
Auteur : Grace Ashiru
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