Andres Garchitorena
Andres Garchitorena is a researcher in global health and spatial epidemiology at the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development (IRD). His work focuses on understanding and reducing inequalities in access to healthcare in low-resource settings, with a particular emphasis on Madagascar, where he has worked for nearly a decade in collaboration with the Ministry of Health and local partners.
He combines OpenStreetMap, geospatial analysis, and health system data to develop decision-support tools that inform community health programs and national health policies. His recent work explores how large-scale, high-resolution mapping can be used to quantify geographic barriers to care and optimize last-mile service delivery, bridging the gap between open mapping communities and operational public health systems.
Session
This talk presents how large-scale mapping in OpenStreetMap enabled the creation of high-resolution tools to measure and reduce geographic barriers to healthcare in rural Madagascar, from optimizing community health worker deployment to planning door-to-door interventions. Building on a district-level pilot, we scaled this approach across multiple regions and estimated the resources required for nationwide mapping, highlighting how OSM can serve as a foundation for data-driven health system planning and improved access to care.