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Shared map view

Open the choropleth built from the data we currently have

The interactive municipality map now lives on its own page so this overview can stay lighter and easier to browse. It reflects the municipality-level service data currently loaded into NGO Finder, not a complete picture of every service on the ground.

Top 20 municipalities in our current dataset by population

Compare the largest municipalities in the NGO Finder dataset and see how many NGOs, police stations, and hospitals or clinics are currently mapped per 10,000 people.

Population and service coverage data will appear here once municipality mappings and services are loaded.

Methodology and Limits

How to read and reuse this shared work

This page combines municipality population data currently loaded in NGO Finder with our mapped service database. At the moment, the app is using municipality population figures stored as 2022 population data, together with municipality boundaries imported from a 2018 boundary file. Service density is shown as the number of NGOs, police stations, and hospitals or clinics per 10,000 residents so others can understand both the usefulness and the limits of the current dataset.

Methodology

  • Population is assigned at municipality level and used to calculate services per 10,000 people.
  • Service counts come from the NGO Finder database, grouped into NGOs, police stations, and hospitals or clinics.
  • Municipality matching depends on city-to-municipality mappings, so results are only as strong as those mappings.
  • The choropleth map is intended as a directional overview of the data currently loaded into NGO Finder, not a complete census of services.

Challenges and Limits

  • Coverage may be incomplete because some services may be missing from the database, newly opened, duplicated, or already closed.
  • Population changes over time, so current on-the-ground demand may differ from the population figures used here.
  • This version does not measure service quality, capacity, staffing, operating hours, accessibility, or specialization.
  • A large hospital and a small hospital are currently counted equally, which can flatten important differences in real service availability.
  • People often travel across municipal boundaries for care, but this view mostly attributes services to the municipality they are mapped into.

What Researchers Should Keep In Mind

  • Treat these results as a screening layer for hypothesis generation, not as a final measure of need or service adequacy.
  • Low service density may reflect true undersupply, but it can also reflect data gaps, boundary effects, or outdated records.
  • Comparisons are more meaningful when combined with local knowledge, field verification, deprivation indicators, transport access, and population change over time.
  • Future improvements should include service quality weighting, recency checks, closure detection, and stronger validation against external administrative datasets.

Phase 2

Next research directions

The next phase should move beyond simple counts and make the research more useful for policy work, service planning, and stronger data interpretation.

Quality and Capacity Weighting

Weight services by size, staffing, specialization, operating hours, and actual service capacity instead of counting every facility equally.

Stronger Demand Signals

Add deprivation, transport access, rurality, safety, and population change so service need can be compared against service supply.

Data Freshness and Validation

Track closures, new openings, verification dates, and external reference datasets to improve confidence in the research outputs.