PISA · Platform
Public Infrastructure Service Access Platform
PISA supports governments, development banks and humanitarian organisations in making better decisions about where to invest in public infrastructure.
At a glance
About PISA
The Public Infrastructure Service Access (PISA) Platform helps governments, development banks and humanitarian organisations make better decisions about where to invest in public infrastructure.
By combining geospatial data, optimisation, and AI, PISA identifies where people lack access to essential services and recommends where new infrastructure, investments or interventions will create the greatest societal impact.
Whether planning healthcare facilities, road networks, water infrastructure or climate resilience investments, PISA turns complex data into practical decision support.
Accessibility analysis in PISA: areas with and without access to essential services.
What PISA can do
PISA combines descriptive analytics, geospatial analysis and mathematical optimisation to support a wide range of infrastructure planning challenges. Typical applications include:
Planning new healthcare facilities and public services
Measuring accessibility to schools, hospitals and markets
Optimising road and transport networks
Identifying infrastructure vulnerable to climate risks
Prioritising public investments under limited budgets
Supporting humanitarian logistics and emergency preparedness
Built as an open and scalable platform, PISA enables governments and researchers to develop new applications while building on a common technical foundation.
How PISA works
PISA combines multiple sources of geospatial data with advanced analytics to support evidence-based infrastructure planning.
Geographical Accessibility Analysis
PISA combines big data sources such as population data, health facility locations, administrative boundaries and digitised road networks with mapping APIs to analyse physical access to facilities like primary health centres, markets and water points. Stacking these sources produces descriptive analytics that reveal areas lacking essential services. Optimisation models then recommend the best locations for new investments, maximising coverage while minimising costs.
Digitised Road Network Creation
Geospatial data is often sparse, especially in less-developed regions. PISA enables the creation of digital road networks by extracting maximum information from limited data, adjusting existing networks such as OpenStreetMap step by step or combining several road network sources. This improves how we optimise trade routes for micro-enterprises and determine optimal hospital placements.
Resilient Infrastructure Planning
PISA identifies roads vulnerable to flood risk and other extreme climate variables, which is crucial for keeping key infrastructure such as hospitals reachable in adverse conditions. By integrating descriptive information with scalable heuristic models, it prioritises road upgrades and pinpoints where additional investment is needed to expand the network, supporting resilient infrastructure development.
Built for global impact
PISA has been developed as an open, cloud-based platform that can be continuously expanded by researchers, governments and development partners. Its user-friendly interface supports decision-makers, while the underlying codebase lets developers and researchers contribute new analytical methods, applications and use cases.
Today, PISA supports research and practical applications ranging from healthcare accessibility and climate resilience to humanitarian logistics and public investment planning, helping organizations turn geospatial data into better decisions.
Accessibility analysis in PISA: areas with and without access to essential services.
Read more about PISA applications in South Sudan, Armenia, Timor Leste, Kenya, Vietnam, and Nepal.
Interested in working with PISA?
Whether you want to improve access to healthcare, optimise transport networks, strengthen climate resilience or support better public investment decisions, we would be happy to explore how PISA can help.