About

Accurate, current, and openly licensed data about where health services exist is the foundation of emergency response, capacity planning, and equitable access.

We build that foundation. healthsites.io is a data collaborative that combines OpenStreetMap's global mapping infrastructure with community validation, institutional partnership, and governance rooted in the accountability of Ministries of Health.

Incomplete or outdated health facility lists cost lives. When emergency services cannot locate the nearest functioning facility, or when maternal health emergencies go unrouted to emergency obstetric care, the result is preventable mortality.

This is solvable through sustained collaboration at scale.

In Saint-Louis, Senegal, our first campaign identified 398 validated health facilities — and 35 potential emergency pregnancy referral services. We are inviting support for phase 2. This open campaign method is replicable across sub-Saharan Africa and beyond, once we systematize the work.

Our campaigns are guided by a question from The Women's Health Innovation domain of the 100 Questions Initiative:

What structural, social, and policy factors perpetuate women's disadvantages across health, political, and economic domains, and what evidence-based transdisciplinary strategies can effectively dismantle these barriers?

Accurate, findable health facility data is one concrete answer. When the nearest emergency maternal facility is on the map, a woman and her family can plan for complications before they become emergencies.

The Emergency Health Mapping Campaign is our cornerstone activity. Working with local OpenStreetMap chapters, Missing Maps partners, and Ministry of Health teams, we:

1. Define priorities through human-centred design workshops with health workers and district health offices
2. Audit existing data across Ministry, NSO, and OpenStreetMap sources — harmonizing facility names and identifying gaps
3. Train on the ground — teaching regional health offices QGIS so they can manage their own data
4. Validate in the field — recruiting and supporting trusted validators who confirm facility locations and services on the ground
5. Feed back to government — all validated data flows back to the Ministry of Health as the validator of record

All data is contributed to OpenStreetMap under the Open Database Licence (ODbL), making it a permanent public good. healthsites.io applies validation governance and connects government, NGOs, and the private sector through a sustainable subscription model.

Our collaboration is built on a framework of trust, transparency, and responsibility:

• Open Database Licence. All data is contributed under ODbL, ensuring its permanent status as a public good.
• Privacy by design. We collect no personal data. Our focus is exclusively on facility metadata.
• Auditable sources. Every data point is tagged with its source, creating a transparent trail.
• Ministry authority. The Ministry of Health retains ultimate authority as the validator of record for its national data.
• Anti-capture structure. Commons-based governance prevents any single commercial actor from controlling the shared resource.

This is why cautious institutions say yes: the framework aligns with data sovereignty, regulatory requirements, and public accountability.

healthsites.io is operated by Open Healthsite Consulting (registered in the Netherlands, No. 90806891) and is a Digital Public Good recognized by the Digital Public Goods Alliance. Mark Herringer is a bilingual practitioner in The Women's Health Innovation domain of the 100 Questions Initiative and a member of the NGI Commons Digital Commons Task Force.

• Academic publications — ORCID 0000-0002-0605-8348 →

We run time-bound campaigns in priority regions, validating health facility data and building institutional capacity.

Current and completed campaigns:

• Saint-Louis, Senegal (2021-present) — 398 facilities validated; 35 emergency maternal referral facilities identified
• Matam, Senegal (2023) — 212 health facilities validated; supporting geospatial data: 93,286 buildings, 1,803 km² of roads, place names, waterways, and infrastructure
• Mozambique (2026-present) — Emergency capacity assessment
• South Africa (2027-planning) — Emergency capacity assessment
• South Sudan (2027-planning) — Emergency capacity assessment
• Tunisia (2027-planning) — Health systems research partnership
• Ghana (2027-planning) — Regional expansion

Each campaign follows the same rigorous methodology: community-led validation, Ministry of Health partnership, permanent publication to OpenStreetMap.

We partner with institutions across government, civil society, the UN system, and geospatial innovation:

Government & national systems
Ministries of Health; National Statistics Offices; eHealth and health information systems projects

Mapping & data communities
OpenStreetMap; Missing Maps; Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOTOSM); CartONG; Heigit

Geospatial & development
Group on Earth Observations (GEO); Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDX); The Data Tank; European Citizen Science

International health & data governance
WHO; UNICEF; UNDP Singapore Global Centre; International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC); Digital Public Goods Alliance

View the Twitter Timeline — 1,067 tweets documenting our evolution from 2015 (Foundation) → 2024 (Institutional Impact)

Questions about partnerships, funding, API integration, campaigns, or mapping?

Contact us →

Follow our progress:
- Bluesky: @sharehealthdata.bsky.social - GitHub: healthsites - Academic: ORCID 0000-0002-0605-8348