Geodata Maintenance and Collaboration in GIS Implementation in Health Sector in a Developing Country Context: The Case of DHIS2 GIS in Malawi

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 applied – immersion in the data, coding, creating categories and identification of themes. It has been found that for GIS applications, the user organisation needs to perform geodata maintenance when a new demand arises; by performing six administrative and technical actions. The framework suggests doing the requirements analysis through the first three actions – identify the need, communicating the need and analysing the need – to decide whether to wait, accept or reject the change. If the decision is the acceptance, geodata update is to be carried out – edit the model, acquire the geodata and edit the dataset. Due to the scarcity of in-house expertise, geodata maintenance requires collaboration in the technical actions such as analyse the need, edit the model and acquire the geodata. However, collaboration needs to be mitigated through substituting GIS experts with local expert users. The thesis contributes to both concept and practice. The thesis explicitly describes geodata maintenance by identifying and defining its actions and elaborating the concept of geographic database update, that is, the thesis builds the rich understanding of the concept of geodata maintenance that has partially been described in GIS literature. Practically, the thesis provides the framework for geodata maintenance in health in developing countries; highlighting key decisions including when and whom to collaborate with to leverage limited resources in the user organization, who local users to substitute for GIS experts and mechanisms of building capacity to those local users.