MUSA Practicum: Understanding the Geography of Healthcare Access in South Africa [Collaboration]

MUSA Practicum: Understanding the Geography of Healthcare Access in South Africa [Collaboration] preview

Status: In progress (Spring 2026)

Our team is currently in the early EDA stages of census wrangling and visualizations.

Overview This practicum is a client-based applied spatial analytics project conducted as part of the MUSA program. The goal of this project is to prototype a method that quantifies pharmacy access in South Africa, and create an analytical report and a web-based viewer that allows a member of the general public (the user) to understand measures of access and how it varies across space and between sub-populations.

The client, Distributed AI Reserach Institute DAIR, is especially interested in the spatial effects of apartheid, and how sub-populations are impacted by the 2024 National Health Insurance (NHI) Act, in the context of pharmacy accessibility and private or public status. Our two study areas are Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal.

Planned Key Deliverables

  • Desktop-based application deployed in using React and MapBoxGL to guide the user through a yet-to-be-determined usecase for this project.
  • R Markdown report documenting methods, model functions, and dictating replicability steps.

Planned Tools:

  • Snowflake AI
  • Python/Jupyter Notebook
  • SQL/PostgresSQL/Postgis
  • Google Places API
  • R
  • Node.js/React
  • Mapbox GL

GitHub:

  • Keep up-to-date on the project’s trajectory! Our final product will be available by early-May. Click here for more information on data layers, schema, and tech stack information.