Estimating geographic access to healthcare facilities in Sub-Saharan Africa by Degree of Urbanisation

Measuring rates of coverage and spatial access to healthcare services is essential to inform policies for development. These rates tend to reflect the urban-rural divide, typically with urban areas experiencing higher accessibility than rural ones. Especially in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), a region experiencing high disease burden amid fast urbanisation and population growth. However, such assessment has been hindered by a lack of updated and comparable geospatial data on urbanisation and health facilities. In this study, we apply the UN-endorsed Degree of Urbanisation (DoU or DEGURBA) method to investigate how geographic access to healthcare facilities varies across the urban-rural continuum in SSA as a whole and in each country, for circa 2020. Results show that geographic access is overall highest in cities and peri-urban areas, where more than 95% of inhabitants live within 30 min from the nearest HCF, with this share decreasing to 80–90% in towns. This share is lowest in villages and dispersed rural areas (65%), with about 10–15% of population more than 3 h away from any health post. Challenges in geographic access seem mostly determined by high travel impedance, since overall spatial densities of HCF are comparable to European levels. •The Degree of Urbanisation enables monitoring the urban-rural access to resources and services across boundaries worldwide.•This work characterizes distribution and accessibility of Health Care Facilities (HCF) by Degree of Urbanisation (DoU).•The accessibility to HCF at given travel time bins is shown by HCF tier of specialisation and share of covered population.•Access to HCF varies significantly across countries, and within countries by DoU territorial class (Fig. 7).•HCF are widespread in Sub-Saharan Africa but the inadequate infrastructure makes them inaccessible, notably in rural areas.