Purpose

The purpose of this project was to develop instructional modules relevant to child and maternal health in cities in developing countries. These modules combine some of the commonly used geographic information systems functions of ArcView with some spatial analysis functions that are used to analyze the geographic distribution of indices of child and maternal health within urban metropolitan areas of cities in developing countries.

We collaborated with the National Institute of Urban Affairs, New Delhi, India and the Department of Geography, The University of Ibadan, Nigeria to develop a web-based training program on the application of geographic information systems to urban housing, environment and vital statistics data for the purpose of establishing relationships between indicators of housing and the environment and child health for small areas of cities in developing countries.

Results

Our web site www.uiowa.edu/~gishlth  (discussed further below) contains six instructional modules. Each module describes the overall purpose of the GIS functions to be learnt, specific instructions to implement the function either using the user's own data or one of the data sets provided by the web module, and an illustration of the results and a discussion of the interpretation of the results.

The modules use new materials developed to train students to do practical GIS analyses using geographic framework data, individual records of health events

and urban housing data. Students learn to compute and display density distributions of infant mortality either in Des Moines, Iowa, or using an alterntive data set provided, a typical city in a developing country. They also learn to compute measures of geographic access to urban services and to compute indicators of expected changes to access if alternative policies for improving urban services are followed, (Richards et al. 1999, Rushton 2000, Rushton and West 1999).

The literature on infant mortality in developed and developing countries has established that areas of high rates are usually localized within metropolitan areas and that intra-metropolitan differences are greater than inter-metropolitan differences. In developed countries these differences have become clearer as techniques were developed for adding small-area geocodes to urban housing characteristics, environmental data, and to vital statistics records of births, birth characteristics and infant deaths. At the same time, the 1990s have seen rapid development of methods of smoothing point-based health data and establishing reliable rates of disease in circumstances where population data is sparse (Anselin 2000, Bithell 1990, Rushton and Lolonis 1996, Wall and Devine 2000).

Our collaborators in New Delhi, India and Ibadan, Nigeria found that vital statistics data within their respective cities were commonly collected from establishments where assisted births take place (hospitals and maternity wards for births) and places for registering deaths.

Previous page  |  Next page