GIS Initiatives in Health Management in Malawi: Opportunities to Share Knowledge

Abstract

The thesis was motivated by the underutilisation of GIS in health in developing countries due to lack of long-term maintenance of geodata. Geodata maintenance is recognised as the central component of any operational GIS for continuously meeting new user requirements. However, the explicit description on how to perform geodata maintenance is missing in GIS literature. GIS literature has not exhaustively defined key activities except geodata collection and geographic database update. The understanding is that geodata maintenance aims at meeting new user requirements. Therefore, to define the exhaustive set of activities, key actions for the requirements analysis are to be identified and defined as part of geodata maintenance. In addition, since geodata maintenance is complex and expensive while many organisations have the shortage of local GIS expertise, key decisions are to be made on when and how to collaborate with other organisations to access such expertise at a low cost. At the same time, the user organisation is to provide opportunities for external experts to impart knowledge to local users during collaboration for the continued GIS support. Therefore, this research aimed at proposing a framework for geodata maintenance in health in developing countries and investigating the contribution of collaboration towards geodata maintenance and the building of local expertise. The study was guided by three questions: (1) What are activities of geodata maintenance in health sector in a developing country setting? (2) How can collaboration assist in the maintenance of geodata in health sector? and (3) How can collaboration contribute towards the building of local expertise for geodata maintenance in health sector?The research was qualitative, interpretive case study using the case of Ministry of Health in Malawi. It was conducted from July 2015 to January 2017. Data was collected through the participant observation, semi-structured interviews and artefact examination. The data analysis was done during the individual paper writing and thesis writing in which the following four key steps were appliedimmersion in the data, coding, creating categories and identification of themes.

Transition into Internet of Things in Resource Constrained Settings: A Case Study from Malawi

“…In the 'application' domain, there are users who are individuals using IS to perform various tasks. Those users can be grouped into two: expert users and novices [19]. Expert users are familiar and experienced with the system while novices are end-users who are not much familiar with the system and hence they need support from expert users and/or implementers [41].…”