Modelled Health Facility Catchment Areas for Malawi

We used AccessMod to generate these catchment areas. Briefly the software’s ‘accessibility’ module enabled us to merged the road network with land cover data, and walking speeds were assigned accordingly. Using these travel speeds, the software calculated travel times to facilities, and cost allocation option enabled implementation of Least Cost Algorithm which calculated travel time to nearest health facility. We did not set a threshold (e.g. 30 minutes walking distance), and this enabled us to calculate travel times even for communities that are far away from health facilities. This allowed us to assign every location to its nearest health facility, essentially defining facility catchment areas based on travel time.