Geo-ST4R — Geospatial Microplanning for
Better Immunisation Reach.

Geo-ST4R is MSS Digital Solutions' flagship geospatial programme, delivered in Kano State in collaboration with Natview Foundation, Data Science Network and Pathfinder International. It focuses on a specific, practical problem: routine immunisation microplans are frequently built from estimated catchment populations rather than the actual locations where children live.

The programme places the Geospatial Microplanning Toolkit (GMT) at health-facility level and trains the teams who prepare microplans — so outreach sessions are planned against mapped settlements, not assumed radii. The intended contribution is clearer visibility of previously overlooked communities within the planning process.

Kano is among the most populous states in Nigeria, with a health system serving dense urban wards alongside widely dispersed rural and peri-urban settlements. That combination makes administrative catchments poor proxies for actual service coverage.

Facility networks are uneven: some facilities serve compact, high-density catchments, while others are nominally responsible for settlements spread across long distances with seasonal access. Planning that treats these as equivalent will systematically under-serve the dispersed ones.

Traditional microplanning allocates sessions using catchment estimates: total population divided by the number of facilities, or historical attendance extrapolated forward. Neither method knows where settlements actually are.

The consequences compound. Sessions are scheduled for places with thin or non-existent populations while settlements beyond a perceived radius receive no session at all. Overlapping catchments double-count communities; gaps leave others uncounted. The plan looks complete on paper and remains incomplete in the field.

Zero-dose children — those who have not received a single routine immunisation antigen — tend to concentrate in settlements that are hardest to see: small, dispersed, seasonal, or simply absent from administrative lists.

Because microplans inherit that invisibility, a zero-dose cluster can persist for years not because services are refused, but because no session was ever planned for that place. Geo-ST4R addresses this upstream, at the point where the microplan is drafted.

The foundation of the programme is settlement-level mapping: identifying and geolocating communities, then relating each to the facilities that serve them. Facility coordinates are verified so that proximity and accessibility analysis reflects reality rather than assumption.

Mapping is treated as a working process, not a one-off data product. As teams use the maps, discrepancies surface — a settlement listed in the wrong ward, a facility recorded at the wrong point — and are corrected through supervision.

The GMT is the delivery instrument of the programme. It presents settlement and facility layers in a form facility teams can interpret without specialist GIS training, and supports the translation of mapped geography into session plans.

Its design principle mirrors MSS's operating philosophy: the tool must be usable by the team that prepares the microplan. Interfaces are kept legible on modest devices, language is operational rather than technical, and outputs map directly onto planning templates that health workers already complete.

The programme deliberately operates at facility level — the layer at which outreach is actually decided. Deploying at state headquarters alone would leave the microplan unchanged; deploying with facility teams changes who plans, and how.

Deployment included onboarding facility teams, establishing which settlements fell within each facility's responsibility, and supporting the first planning cycles with supervision until settlement-level planning became routine practice.

Training was practical and role-specific: reading settlement and facility layers, confirming whether a mapped community is currently served, and assigning sessions accordingly. The objective was competence in the planning decision, not familiarity with software features.

Support continued beyond the training room. Supportive supervision during subsequent planning cycles allowed questions to be resolved against real maps and real settlements, which is where adoption is won or lost.

Geo-ST4R's contribution is procedural: it changed the evidence base on which outreach sessions are planned at facility level. Settlements that were previously absent from planning discussions entered the microplan because they could be seen.

A second contribution is capability. Facility teams now hold a method they can repeat without external facilitation, which is the difference between a pilot that ends and a practice that continues.

The method is intentionally portable. It depends on settlement and facility geography plus facility teams — not on a bespoke configuration. Each state adapts the sequence to its own settlement patterns, facility network and planning calendar.

Replication follows the same arc: map settlements and facilities, deploy the toolkit at facility level, train the planning teams, run supervised planning cycles, then verify that unserved settlements entered the plan.