Application of GIS in Locating New Sites for Health Facilities

Construction of public facilities like school, hospitals and even roads in Kenya has always been advanced by politicians which in most cases end up not being optimized because of poor locations in which they are setup. GIS is a powerful tool that captures, manages, manipulates, analyses and presenting geographical data. Arc Gis 10.2.2 software was employed in this process. This helps in solving geospatial problems like urban planning, shortest economical routes from one point to another, locating best locations for new facilities based on provided factors like in this case. In this setup, we use GIS to locate best location for health facilities by combining, overlaying and manipulating geospatial datasets to attain our goal. The datasets for this being geo-referenced maps of roads, rivers, school, existing health facilities and population dataset. The GIS software tool proved to be a reliable to tool in manipulating these datasets and providing a solution, and presenting in form of maps showing the best locations for new health facilities.