26 August 2021, Apia Samoa
The legacy of a Polynesian navigator has provided the inspiration for an innovative data aggregation, analysis and visualisation platform strengthening health systems across the Indo-Pacific region.
Tupaia is an interactive online map, making life easier for decision makers when it comes to the collection and sharing of vital data on medicines supply and storage, services, infrastructure and equipment as well as staff training needs.
“Tupaia pulls all that information together across the country, a province, a district, a health facility or a village, and you can zoom in an out and see the data aggregated at those different levels,” said Erin Nunan of Beyond Essential Systems.
“If you want to see how many people a country has seen in respect to the COVID-19 outbreak or a dengue outbreak, all that information will be displayed in Tupaia. .
“So you can look into the national level and see how many people have accessed health services within a specified time frame or you can zoom into a province, a district there more specifically for details about where they maybe gaps to people accessing the health system or where people are really doing well and that allows a country to set up different responses in response to what they are seeing.”
The story of the Tupaia innovation is one of the solutions to be showcased during the SIDS Solutions Forum, scheduled for 30 – 31 August 2021.
The Forum creates a space for government leaders, development partners, farmers, fishers, community development practitioners and leaders, entrepreneurs, women and youth to discuss, share, promote and encourage home-grown and imported solutions to respond to the challenges posed by COVID-19 and others that pre-exist the pandemic.
One of the Forum’s key messages focuses on promoting local solutions to global problems.
Tupaia is one such solution especially as nations – SIDS and non-SIDS – struggle with the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. Tupaia was a Polynesian navigator who joined Captain Cook’s crew in 1769 and came through the Pacific on Endeavor. He was able to help the Europeans at the time to map the Pacific, better than they could with all their modern day tools.
“Whatever it is you want to do with data, whether its data collection, data aggregation, analysis, visualization or dissemination, we want you to be able to that with Tupaia,” Nunan said. “Whether you’re doing health programming, education programming, agriculture, any other place in tech, we want that project to be powered by Tupaia so that everything is in a one place, its free and absolutely world class.”
The Forum is being convened virtually by FAO in partnership with the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). The Government of Fiji is the co-host. The ultimate goal is to accelerate the achievement of the agriculture; food and nutrition related Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the S.A.M.O.A Pathway priorities in SIDS.
A preliminary programme is available here.
To register for the forum please click here
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About FAO
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) is an intergovernmental organization that works in over 130 countries to help eliminate hunger and poverty.
For more information about FAO and its programmes visit: www.fao.org
