Luanshya District pushes towards malaria elimination through application of geospatial technologies to guide and deliver malaria interventions
By Akros Media on June 25, 2023 in GIS, Malaria, News, Uncategorized
Malaria elimination requires consistent high coverage of effective malaria prevention and treatment interventions—and high coverage is challenging to achieve particularly in developing countries where highly urban or highly rural areas may not have address systems, limited maps, and challenging access due to rains, poor infrastructure, flooding, or severe events or conflict.
In order for insecticides, such as Fludora Fusion or other chemicals, to most effectively kill mosquitoes and reduce malaria burden, high coverage is required. Envu, in collaboration with Akros and the National Malaria Control Program (NMCP) in Zambia conducted an exciting rollout of geospatial planning and delivery of indoor residual spray (IRS) in Luanshya District Zambia during the 2022 spray season. The open source platform, Reveal, was used to support the planning of the campaign, including target areas, households which would be visited and sprayed, as well as the human resources and commodities required to deliver the campaign.
Spray teams, including each team lead, were outfitted with the Reveal application on their smartphones or tablets. Through this application, each team was able to clearly see which settlements in Luanshya District were targeted during microplanning prior to navigating to these areas and could clearly visualize on their phone where they were in relationship to each sprayable structure and whether it had been visited or not.