PISA

What is PISA?

The Public Infrastructure Service Access (PISA) is designed and developed as a tool to allow governments, public sector organizations, and development partners to make data-driven decisions pertaining to baseline mappings of key assets such as roads, bridges, and primary healthcare infrastructure.

PISA’s user interface serves decision-makers and is backed by a cloud-based, comprehensively documented codebase. This setup enables global developers and scientists to enhance PISA’s functionalities and create diverse use cases for its application.

PISA aims at reducing this complexity and makes available a set of tools and techniques to scale and replicate use cases around the use of optimization models for decision-making across countries to make planning and budgeting decisions by following a People-Process-Technology focus:

People: We build technical capability and upskill stakeholders towards the use of data and analytics to perform descriptive, diagnostic, and prescriptive analytics.
Process: We facilitate the seamless integration of multiple stakeholders working together to ensure user-centric design while equipping developers and programmers with the required infrastructure and environments to perform scalable and replicable analytics.
Technology: We make sure that the back-end scalability and user-centric design culminate in the development of cutting-edge technologies that can facilitate near-real-time decision-making and have the capability to be expanded to onboard new use cases, and further functionalities.

Despite the private sector’s embrace of analytics, the public sector faces challenges like data fragmentation and talent competition. PISA addresses these challenges by emphasizing clear metrics and bridging the gap between data and decision-making through prescriptive analytics. Also, to counter the trend of failed big-data platform developments, PISA adheres to the nine principles of digital development, ensuring value delivery to governments for advancing policy goals.

How does PISA work?

PISA offers three main functionalities:

Geographical Accessibility Analysis: PISA leverages big data sources like population data, health facility locations, global administrative boundaries, and digitized road networks, along with APIs like Mapbox/Google, to analyze physical access to facilities such as primary health centers, markets, and water points. By stacking these data sources, PISA generates descriptive analytics to identify areas lacking access to essential services. These insights are then used in optimization models to recommend optimal locations for new investments, maximizing coverage while minimizing costs.

Digitized Road Network Creation: PISA addresses the challenge of sparse geospatial data, particularly in less-developed regions, by enabling the creation of digital road networks. It adapts existing methods to extract maximum information from limited data, allowing for the incremental adjustment of existing road networks (e.g., OpenStreetMap) or the combination of multiple road network sources. This functionality enhances our ability to optimize 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, crucial for ensuring geographic accessibility to key infrastructure like hospitals, even under adverse conditions. By integrating descriptive information with scalable heuristic models, PISA prioritizes road upgrades and identifies areas requiring additional investment to expand the road network, contributing to resilient infrastructure development.

The PISA Dashboard

We created this interactive dashboard to showcase all the ongoing and finished PISA projects. By clicking on each dot, you will be able to discover the specific project we developed thanks to PISA in that part of the world!