Filters and targets

Using the 'Filters and targets' section, you can select:
  •   A country
  •   The area of interest where the optimisation occurs at (most of the time, at national level).
  •   The type of site that you want to see results for.
  •   The service radius used to generate the size of the coverage area of the existing and new sites.
  •   The target type (minimum additional people per site or overall percentage of population covered), with a slider to select the actual target figures.
By adjusting the filters, target type, and toggling on or off the option to show unselected sites (sites excluded due to the parameters you chose), you can model a placement scenario and see how the results and population coverage change in the Results panels. You can also download a csv file of the results from the 'Data table' tab.

Understanding target types

Minimum additional people per site:
You can choose this type of target when the cost of setting up a new site is only worth it if it serves a certain number of people. For the population in the sizes areas of sites that do not meet this threshold, other solutions would ideally be followed, for example laying on transportation so people are able to make the journey to sites further afield.

Overall percentage of population covered:
This type of target is used when you have an intended proportion of the population you want to reach, e.g. 80% of the population to be vaccinated. The sites shown are those that will be able to achieve this, based on the number of people they are estimated to serve.

Filters and targets

Results | Overview

Results | Graphs

Percentage of population covered
People covered by each new site

Developed by

How to use the data table

Data presented in this table are based on the criteria selected on the Dashboard tab. This is another way to visualise the optimisation outputs, for those who do not need the focus to be a map or who want to see the actual figures differently.

On this page, you can download a csv of the results, either the current page you're on, or the full table. Be aware that this might download a large amount of data.

How to read the table

At the top, you can decide whether you want to list the new sites only, or if you want the existing sites to be featured in the table, for reference.
  •   The columns Country; Opt_area; Site_type & Service_radius are the criteria you selected in the dashboard view.
  •   Category tells you if the site you are looking at is a new one suggested by the optimisation algorithm, or an existing one. If you have not selected 'include existing sites in table', only new sites will be included.
  •   Latitude and Longitude gives you the location of the site in question.
  •   Rank gives you the priority order of the newly added site in comparison to the others. They are ordered from the largest additional coverage to the smallest.
  •   Extra_people_covered tells you the number of additional people the new site is covering in its service radius. This is the number of people covered by the site who are not covered by previously suggested sites (additional coverage).
  •   Existing_site_data_source gives you the hyperlink for the source we used to determine the location of existing sites. When downloading, this will change for the actual URL.



Location allocation problems


To deliver successful interventions, it is crucial for decision makers to understand where populations live in relation to public and private services.

Deciding where services, such as schools, vaccination centres or financial access points, should be placed is a classic but critical spatial problem in resource allocation. Systematic ways to situate those services are especially helpful in contexts where resources are very limited and some populations or areas are marginalised.

Commonly asked questions within this problem include:

  •   Where to situate new service points to cover the largest number of people? Where to place staff to provide sufficient service capacity?
  •   What is the minimum number of service points we need to add to cover everyone? Or to cover 95%? If we add 100 service points, then what is the largest number (or %) of people that can be covered?
  •   Where to prioritise the set up of new services points or upgrade?




Our solution


To answer these questions, Flowminder has developed a lightweight, adaptable optimised placement tool that can rapidly return a set of ranked service points to achieve 100% coverage of the population.



Our service has been deployed in over 10 countries/sectors, including for mobile money agents in Tanzania, COVID-19 vaccination sites in Zambia and Nigeria, routine immunisation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, radio masts in Sierra Leone, and school placement in Nigeria.






Contact

To discuss how we can help solve your location allocation problem, email info@flowminder.org.