I am part of the Data for Children Collaborative which is a joint partnership between UNICEF, The Scottish Government and the University of Edinburgh’s Data Driven Innovation Programme. It seeks to improve outcomes for children locally, nationally and globally. We draw on the strengths of all partners to bring insight and solve problems using data and data science techniques. Currently i am involved in two projects listed below.  I am always happy to discuss dissertation opportunities that arise through the Collaborative. 

Current Projects:

Estimating travel time to health centre in Africa using open source data

Building on the previous project that produced 20m resolution travel time estimates for Uganda, Tanzania, Zimbabwe and Mozambique. We performed sensitivity analysis to identify an optimal spatial resolution that could balance the accuracy of estimating access whilst reducing the file sizes of the output products. We are currently working to create 100m spatial resolution travel time maps for 54 countries in Africa. These are currently being prepared for upload to the Humanitarian Data Exchange.

Mapping gender related barriers for immunisation using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) – GenVax:

Disparities exist within countries and between different population groups in immunisation coverage and equity is fundamental to universal health coverage. The Equity Reference Group for Immunisation (ERG) identified four major challenges to gender equity in immunisation: lower household and community status limiting agency; physical and time barriers to access services; lack of health literacy; and, experience of quality of service. This project aims to strengthen the availability of timely and granular data to better identify gender-related barriers to immunisation and inform targeted pro-equity strategies. GIS allows the linkage of existing data sources on population characteristics, health outcomes and health infrastructure to provide insights on determinant of health inequities.

Past Projects:

How can we produce a time series of childhood wasting estimates, accounting for climate impacts? (SEASNUT): 

This project sets out to establish if it is possible to use secondary (other existing) variables to estimate wasting where it has not been previously measured. This involves correcting the temporal inconsistencies in sampling, allowing for a more effective historical trend and subsequent projection to the future. There are plans for 3 modelling attempts to explore how to achieve this. Firstly, the research team will link stunting data that is also collected to prevalence of wasting between surveys based upon the hypothesis that stunting is an integration of past wasting and its variation between surveys gives an indication of past wasting intensity.  This work will be conducted across multiple countries including but not limited to Nigeria, Ethiopia, Burkina Faso & Bangladesh. Secondly, there will be a deep dive into the potential relationship between diverse spatial variables and wasting values using standard and Bayesian approaches. This project is funded through a collaboration between the Data for Children Collaborative and the Jameel Observatory. The research is an inter-disciplinary collaboration between; Strathmore University (Kenya); The Environment Protection Agency in Ghana; UNICEF; University of Edinburgh; University of Southampton; WHO.

Childrens Climate Risk Index with UNICEF (phase 1 – September 2020 – April 2022).

I am a co-investigator on this project which is working with UNICEF on the childrens climate risk index that they have developed. The project involves adding climate projections (UoE), investigating how to project the socioeconomic vulnerability to 2050 (University of Southampton) and developing further plans for improving the index in the future (University of Stirling). I am leading a work-package investigating how to downscale the global index to sub-national levels using existing household survey data for Uganda and Tanzania. The work has also been covered in several media outlets: Guardian; Telegraph; BBC Newsround;  Independent;  bdnews24 (Bangladesh); The Times and the report can be found here.

Childrens Climate Risk Index with UNICEF (phase 2 – April 2022 – December 2022).

The second phase of the CCRI was released on October 25th 2022 by UNICEF and focused on Heat Waves analysis and how many children are exposed to heat wave frequency, heat wave duration, heat wave severity and the TX35. The report can be found here and it was also covered on Channel 4 news and in the Guardian.

Child Poverty and Access to Services  March 2020 – March 2022

I was the Principle Investigator on this project which had a focus on mapping children’s physical accessibility to key services, such as  health clinics and primary schools in selected countries. We explored whether the travel time to nearest health centre could help explain a child’s lack of access to that service, and how access was related to multidimensional childhood poverty. The team included: Charlotte Haddon (RA in Geospatial Livelihoods Group and Geosciences), William Smith in the School of Education, Sohan Seth in the School of Informatics, Magnus Hagdorn in the School fo Geosciences, Enrique Delamonica from UNICEF and Jodie Brumhead formerly of the Geospatial Livelihoods Group and now with Scottish Government. For more information see the Data for Children website the project generated several data sets on estimated travel times which can be found here and a Scientific Data paper was published in 2022 describing the data

Building Footprint Identification for Population Estimations June 2020 – December 2021

I was a co-investigator on this project which has a focus on population estimates at the local level to better support health services planning and delivery. We created a bottom-up model that is able to estimate population using high resolution satellite data. The team included: Sohan Seth (PI) and Isaac Neal in Informatics, myself and Mamadou Saliou Diallo from UNICEF. The work was published in a Scientific Reports paper in 2022 and can be found here.