Using satellite imagery to improve immunization coverage in DRC
Only one in three children in the DRC is fully immunized. Here's how semi-automated micro-planning documents — built from satellite-derived population data — helped change that.
Challenge Overview
The Democratic Republic of the Congo faces significant immunization barriers — only one in three children is fully immunized. Vaccine hesitancy, supply chain fragility, and healthcare worker shortages all contribute, but a foundational problem sits upstream: health area managers simply lack reliable data on where villages are and how many people live in them.
The nation's vast geography compounds this. With over 2.3 million km² and a largely rural population spread across remote terrain, reaching every community requires precision that paper-based planning cannot provide.
Without accurate population maps, healthcare workers cannot optimise their routes, estimate vaccine quantities, or ensure no community is left behind. The data gaps lead directly to under-vaccination — and they disproportionately hurt the most marginalised communities.
Solution: Semi-Automated Micro-Planning Documents
Acasus partnered with the Expanded Immunization Program, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and GRID3 to generate semi-automated micro-planning documents for health areas across two provinces. The goal: give every vaccination team a practical, data-driven field guide.
The initiative drew on complementary datasets: CIESIN at Columbia University and WorldPop at the University of Southampton for population estimates, and Flowminder for mobility modelling. These layers were combined with GRID3's DRC-specific settlement boundaries to produce village-level population grids at 100m resolution.
After generating drafts algorithmically, local vaccination teams validated borders and corrected local knowledge — ensuring the documents reflected ground truth, not just satellite inference. The hybrid approach kept technical accuracy while grounding outputs in field experience.
Outcomes and Impact
Healthcare workers gained practical guidelines for planning immunization sessions — clearer routes, better population estimates, and explicit coverage targets for each village. The micro-planning documents covered over 600 health areas across two provinces.
Survey results showed over 90% of healthcare workers preferred the new satellite-informed planning approach over their previous methods. The shift was not just technical: teams reported greater confidence in their session plans and felt better equipped to justify resource requests.
The strategy particularly benefited the most marginalised communities. Analysis found that 60% of vaccination sites serve populations under 1,000 people — precisely the settlements most likely to be missed by coarse administrative maps. By anchoring planning to satellite-derived data, the programme reduced invisible gaps in coverage.