How Open Buildings is enabling Healthcare delivery in Africa

Picture a healthcare worker setting out at dawn to vaccinate children in a remote village, unsure of the homes they need to reach. This knowledge gap costs time, resources, and lives. Google’s Open Buildings dataset is helping to fix this.

What is Open Buildings?

Developed by our Google Research Africa team the free-to-use Open Buildings dataset delivers actionable building data for over 1.8 billion structures across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean where such information was previously out-of-date or non-existent. In 2024 we added the 2.5D Temporal layer, capturing how buildings evolve. This living view helps governments, NGOs and startups understand population needs, enabling them to build clinics, design roads, and dispatch aid faster and more fairly.

Across Africa, this data is already improving healthcare. Ministries, researchers and NGOs pair the Open Buildings dataset with local insight to understand where to invest and how to reach people that need resources the most. Two recent projects—one in Rwanda, another in northern Nigeria—show the impact when actionable data meets on-the-ground commitment.

Rwanda: Building clinics where they’re needed most

Rwanda’s Ministry of Health has set a strategic objective to ensure that all citizens reside within 30 minutes of a healthcare facility. However, the availability of accurate and up-to-date settlement maps remains limited, posing a challenge to effective planning and service delivery. Enter Sand Technologies, a pan-African technology company specializing in data science and AI-driven solutions and long-time ministry partner of Rwanda’s ministry of health. Using Open Buildings as a base layer, the team built a Healthcare Investment Planning Tool that measures travel time to the nearest facility, highlights “health-care deserts” and pinpoints ideal sites for new potential clinics. Insights that once required weeks of field surveys now appear in minutes, and the first clinics planned with the tool will serve tens of thousands of people who previously faced long, costly journeys to see a doctor.

Nigeria: Providing life-saving vaccines to every child

In northern Nigeria, health teams struggle to reach “zero-dose” children — kids 12 months and above who are due but yet to receive the first dose of Penta 1 vaccine. Many live in settlements missing from conventional maps. A collaboration between WorldPop at the University of Southampton and the African Field Epidemiology Network (AFENET) Nigeria used Open Buildings to uncover those hidden clusters. By overlaying building footprints with clinic locations and travel-time models, the teams estimated population sizes far more accurately, prioritised outreach to the hardest-to-reach villages and reduced wasted trips.

Open Buildings underpins projects far beyond medicine. Renewable-energy developers use roof counts to size solar mini-grids that match local demand; disaster-management agencies combine footprints with satellite imagery for flood and storm relief coordination; and urban researchers analyse settlement patterns to understand commuting, job access and housing. Each application feeds lessons back to the community, so the dataset keeps improving while innovators start further ahead.

A wider toolkit for health innovators

Open Buildings is part of our wider health-AI toolkit. Travel-time insights from Google Maps already help officials in Nigeria and Ghana spot where women travel furthest for emergency obstetric care and reposition ambulances. Our Health AI Developer Foundations and Open Health Stack simplify building healthcare AI models and secure, interoperable digital-health apps. And our new population-dynamics foundation model provides localized insights on how communities interact with their environment. This data can inform models that predict prevalence and spread of disease to help inform public health policy and resource allocation decisions. Each tool addresses a different bottleneck, together giving frontline workers a sharper picture of who needs care, where and when.

If you’re a researcher, policymaker or social entrepreneur, explore the dataset at g.co/openbuildings. If you’re already using Open Buildings — or any of our health-AI resources — to solve real-world problems, we’d love to hear your story. Write to us at open-buildings-dataset@google.com so we can learn from your experience and share it with others.