UNICEF’s Open API

Mike Fabrikant
Jul 24, 2017 · 2 min read

The Office of Innovation at UNICEF has a program to ingest open data (weather, population, mosquito prevalence, case data..etc), and then use aggregation and enrichment to make it more useful to disaster prevention and response.

Below is a guide to the first version of UNICEF’s open API. This is an experimental project, and while all code is open source, test coverage is far from 100%.

A more in depth guide can be found here.

Paho zika case data

Paho provides zika case data for the Americas in epi week format in excel spreadsheets. To make it more machine readable, we’ve downloaded the files, and saved them in json.

In an effort to calculate zika risk, we’ve also aggregated the case data by ISO week in order to overlay with travel data from Amadeus.

This github repository has scripts to:

  • download the excel sheets
  • extract the data and generate json
  • aggregate by ISO week.

Population from worldpop.org aggregated by admin shapefiles from gadm.org. This article titled, Mapping the world’s population with worldpop.org.uk demonstrates how we use postGIS to aggregate population data in raster by shapefiles.

  • /population/countries — returns all available countries
  • /population/countries/:country serves population values per admin for requested country. Currently, the highest admin level offered by gadm per country is served. This article describes the aggregation process. Here is the source code.

Mosquito prevalence

Thanks to the authors of The global distribution of the arbovirus vectors Aedes aegypti and Ae. albopictus, we were able to aggregate raster files with geographic prevalence probability data for albopictus and aegypti by administrative regions.

  • /mosquito/kinds/:kind/countries lists the countries we were able to aggregate by.
  • /mosquito/kinds/:kind/countries/:country serves highest level admin available from gadm with prevalence score.

Thank you to Pratik Kulkarni from RIT for contributing to this article as well as the API.

Mike Fabrikant

Written by

T4D Software Lead at UNICEF, Sierra Leone

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