The problem

Problem

Globally, 1.9 billion people have no access to healthcare just because they live in rural regions of their country.

01 · Location

Offical maps are missing villages

Many offical maps used by governments in order to give data to health facilities are missing many rural villages. This is especially common in developing countries. Without the maps knowing where these people are, the only way to find them is using a satelite.

This was explicitly proven in 2025, when a scientific study compared the five most popular population maps against real-life headcounts in rural areas of the world. None of them were anywhere near the corrent answer. Instead, they all heavily underestimated the region's full population. The best map, WorldPop, only accounted for 47% of the region's population.[1]

Offical maps often hide villages that we can find through satellite imagery
Official mapTownSatellite · 4 villages the map left out
How much each population map undercounted rural residents, on average (1975–2010)[1]
  • WorldPop−53%
  • GWP−65%
  • GRUMP−67%
  • LandScan−68%
  • GHS-POP−84%

02 · Route

Clinics don't know the cheapest way to reach them

Even if the government knows where the villages are, they still don't always know the most efficient way to reach them.

With a large majority of all health clinics being in cities or towns, it can be incredibly difficult to figure out which clinic should take the effort to reach the nearest villages.

Along with the issue of which clinic should attempt to reach the village, there is also the issue of how they should plan to get there, as the shortest route is often not the cheapest. To solve something like this, the health clinic would need some way to consistently weigh different terrians across paths.

Out of every 100 people in the world, how far each one is from the nearest health facility[2]
  • 9More than an hour away, even by car
  • 34Reachable by car, but more than an hour's walk
  • 57Within an hour's walk
The shortest route on the map isn't always the cheapest
Cheapest · 26 km of paved road · $36Shortest · 18 km of dirt track · $81ClinicVillage

03 · Funding

Rural clinics don't get enough money

In order to split the money between different health facilities, the cost of travel and number of people visited must be known precisly. In the case of rural facilities, neither of these values are known(due to issues 1 and 2). Without them, governments do not know how much money to give each facility, which severly limits the amount of good they can do.

This is due to what happens when the government is not given a precise cost estimate. Without knowing the true cost of serving their people, governments worry about overspending and wasting resources that could be used elsewhere. As overspending becomes the main thought in their minds, the result is almost always underspending, which can lead to incredible plans going unfullfilled.

How a missing village loses its funding
  1. Not on the mapSatellites can see the roofs, but the official map is empty.
  2. Not countedPopulation estimates leave the people out.
  3. Not in the budgetMoney is split by headcount, so none is set aside.
  4. Not enough careThe nearest clinic is short on staff, vaccines and fuel.
How a missing cost estimate leads to underspending
  1. No cost estimateNobody knows what staff, fuel and travel to each village will cost.
  2. Budget by guessingPlanners have to guess how much rural outreach needs.
  3. Fear of overspendingRunning out of money halfway through is risky, so they guess low.
  4. Too little spentTrips get cut, and the farthest villages are dropped first.

Sources

  1. Láng-Ritter, Keskinen & Tenkanen (2025): Global gridded population datasets systematically underrepresent rural populationNature Communications 16, March 2025.
  2. Weiss et al. (2020): Global maps of travel time to healthcare facilitiesNature Medicine 26, 1835–1838. Travel time to the nearest hospital or clinic, on foot and by motorized transport.