Basic Terms

Planwise projects are created with the following approach:

  • There is a known or estimated demand of a particular service (E.g. Meningitis Rapid test) for a country or region.
  • There is a list of locations that provide the service.  Each location can cover a certain amount of demand.
  • There is a list of all possible options to enhance or satisfy demand.
  • Planwise then calculates satisfied and unsatisfied demand and gives suggestions for the best investment to cover the demand.

Source Datasets

There are then two types of source data in Planwise.  These include: 

  1. GIS source data: usually consisting of a Raster file composed of a grid with defined demand for each cell (a cell represents a portion of terrain)
  2. Point demand sources consist of a CSV file where each row represents a point in the map (with lat-long coordinates) and has a certain amount of demand that needs to be covered.

Point demand sources

These sources need to have the following information:

  • id (a number that helps to identify each row)
  • type (descriptive text)
  • name 
  • lat
  • lon
  • tags (descriptive text that can be used for filtering)
  • unsatisfied-demand (the amount of demand that need to be covered in a defined period of time) 

and need to be saved in csv (no BOM) format


The GIS sources need to be uploaded by InSTEDD technical team


Provider dataset

This dataset is similar to the punctual demand sources, it is a list of providers with lat-long coordinates and a certain capacity (this will be used to calculate the coverage of the demand)

This file has the following columns:

  • id (a number that helps to identify each row)
  • type (descriptive text)
  • name
  • lat
  • lon
  • capacity
  • tags (descriptive text that can be used for filtering)

The capacity column represents the amount of demand that each provider is able to satisfy in a defined period of time. (E.g the number of Meningitis rapid tests that can be done in 1 year).



Working with scenarios


Start a new scenario from here

When clicking on start a new scenario it will calculate the total unsatisfied demand and the percentage on the left bar will show the increment of the coverage.

You can create as many scenarios as needed in any project

Create a new provider


It allows you to create a new provider at any point on the map.


Get suggestions for a new provider


It calculates the best options for creating a new provider based on the demand it will be able to cover based on location and coverage distance.


Get suggestions to improve existing providers


It orders the existing providers by unsatisfied demand and it suggests increasing capacity for the ones with larger unsatisfied demand.

At this point, it also suggests upgrading labs that are not providing the service currently (this is based on the information the user has entered in the project settings "Upgrading an existing provider")