Malaria Indicators Analysis for Zimbabwe at Different Spatial Resolutions with Focus on Climate Factors

The analysis of the malaria indicators in Zimbabwe was carried out using an approach that considers different resolutions. Malaria is an infectious disease transmitted by Anopheles mosquitoes that affects many humans, especially in Africa. Several intervention programs have been conducted over the years to prevent and fight the disease, which causes hundreds of thousands of deaths throughout the world each year (429,000 estimated malaria deaths in 2015), according to the World Health Organization (WHO). This thesis shows our analysis about possible malaria indicators, starting from a country resolution and ending with a district resolution. Several indicators have been considered such as health care facility locations, parasite rate and sickle cell trait frequency in the population, with a focus on climate indicators such as temperature, precipitation, humidity, wind and elevation. Our idea was that all of these indicators may be possible candidates to reaching the goal of finding good correlations to malaria occurrences. The biggest issue and challenge faced during this project has been finding the relevant data, since many datasets only contain information about some districts, with different spatial and time resolutions. Our goal is to consider all the potentially relevant data that have been found online, analyze them and extrapolate as much useful information as possible.