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.