Effortless data
Collection and Curation
Gather - A versatile data collection tool
which enables people to securely collect data in the field and share it everywhere it is needed.
Created by eHealth Africa to collect and curate data that saves lives.
Try It For Yourself
Save lives one datapoint at a time
eHealth Africa’s years of experience in assisting, managing and undertaking a wide variety of data collection projects has shown that we faced recurring challenges when having to analyze and curate the collected data.
We saw a clear opportunity to solve these challenges with a unique solution that enables us to speed up the way effective health interventions and emergency services decisions are made.
Gather is a versatile software tool that empowers people to collect data in the field and quickly share it anywhere it's needed. Built from the ground up with the highest standards of security and with the widest range of extensibility in mind, Gather can be easily enhanced with data extraction, masking, and publishing capabilities.
Gather is an open source project that is freely available to everyone.
We believe that eHealth Africa’s solutions save lives when they are completed quickly, adopted fully, maintained easily, and interoperate with other solutions
Challenges
Interoperability
Existing tools collect data with specific forms instead of mapping them to defined structures. This complicates the flow of data between data-producing and data-consuming applications and entails expensive processes of data export and restructuring before publication can take place.
Timely Collection and Publication
Public health workers are frequently dispatched to remote locations to collect or update medical data. They need a tool able to store data modifications, synchronize them once they regain connection, and stream real time data to external applications.
Data Curation
Raw collected data often need to be modified before publishing.However, most of the existing data collection tools do not support data curation. This includes data validation, deduplication, ID assignment, and enrichment from external sources.
What Gather does
Data Collection Management
Gather works with the ODK Collect Mobile App which performs surveys in the field and a Web App that manages campaigns, creates, and administers the data collectors and monitors the progress of data collection.
Data Curation Processes
Being built on the Aether platform, Gather can perform data curation activities such as masking data for privacy requirements or integrating them with other systems and workflows for management, transformation, and analysis.
Timely and Secure Data Publication
Gather can be deployed using high trust cloud environments such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, as well as on-premises deployment in order to reinforce security and better manage data sharing workflows.
Use cases
The Impact of Gather
Developed in 2015 for a nutrition project in Somalia, Gather is currently in use on a number of different projects in several countries, and has already collected data from hundreds of thousands of submissions. Here are a few recent projects where Gather was used:
CHAMPS - Sierra Leone
The CHAMPS (Child Health and Mortality Prevention Surveillance) Network is a global program aiming to identify and prevent child death through disease surveillance, death registries, and data collection. CHAMPS uses Gather to collect the data in Sierra Leone and share them across-countries within the organization’s network.Gather guarantees data security and government’s control over the collected Information.
An average of 11 calls per week to report child deaths in 2018
GRID - Nigeria
The GRID (Geospatial Reference Information Data) project collects spatial reference data and other points of interest such as health facilities, schools, markets, post offices, etc. to create a geodatabase that the government uses for data-driven decision making. Gather collects the data and makes sure that new data collection efforts fit right into the existing data pipelines and publishing processes.
460,014 points of interest collected since Nov 2017
Microcensus - DRC
The DRC Microcensus project aims to conduct a microcensus in the region of Kinshasa and Bandundu to predict how many people live in each settlement and estimate the total population for DRC. The project needed a very tailored solution for data collection with an advanced UI able to reproduce maps. Gather software versatility allowed to create a very specific solution in a short period of time.
Over34,000households and171,000individuals were surveyed