Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Strategic Immunization Geotemporal Mapping Application (SIGMA), is an easy to use web-based tool to help various decision makers in the disease control and immunization world. SIGMA forecasts temporal demand for different vaccines in a country, in different parts of the country, and for each immunization location. In the specific use case for the grant, the tool determined the number and characteristics of women and children that are reachable and not reachable by current immunization locations and strategies in any given country. It identified the locations and operating characteristics of various immunization strategies (e.g., outreach, campaigns, and other hybrid strategies) that were needed to supplement the fixed immunization locations. SIGMA then helped estimate the costs and cost-effectiveness of different immunization strategies. As a planning tool, SIGMA demonstrated how robust these answers and solutions are to varying conditions (e.g., population migration, birth rates, compliance with immunization). SIGMA is an innovative combination of geographical information systems (GIS) technology and various economic and modeling analytics specific to immunization that can be readily used by key stakeholders to assist in locating hard to reach populations and developing strategies to reach them are crucial to disease eradication, elimination, and reduction efforts in malaria, polio, HIV, tuberculosis, pneumonia, enteric diseases, and various other diseases. SIGMA can help product delivery by introducing more strategic and evidence-based approaches to placing locations and planning outreach and campaigns.