How Veligraph is built
255,963 facility records across 53 countries, rebuilt from official sources into one schema. This page is the method, plainly stated.
Sources
Records come from four classes of source, in order of preference:
- National facility registers, such as Nigeria's NHFR, queried or exported from the official system
- Ministry of health master lists and licensing bodies' published lists
- Curated open datasets published under open licences by governments and research institutions
- Archived registry snapshots where an official portal has gone offline, clearly marked as archived
Every record stores its source name, vintage and licence. We name sources on every page and never scrape private or paywalled databases.
Pipeline
- Normalize. Each source is mapped into one schema of 38 attributes: identity, place, level of care, ownership, capacity, staffing, services, licensing, coordinates.
- Classify. Facility type and ownership are classified with multilingual rules (English, French, Portuguese) when the source does not state them.
- Deduplicate. Exact duplicates are removed, then near-duplicates are collapsed: same name in the same state and district is treated as one facility, keeping the most complete record; same-name facilities in different districts stay separate.
- Flag, never edit. Implausible figures (for example a bed count far above the facility's registered level, or more doctors than beds) are flagged for verification and shown flagged. We do not silently change source numbers.
How to read our counts
Counts on this site are facilities tracked by Veligraph, not national totals. Coverage varies by country with the quality of the available sources, and the private sector is undercounted in several countries. Where we know coverage is partial, we say so on the country page.
Verification
A record marked registry-verified appears in the named official register. Where multiple sources cover the same facility, fields are cross-checked and disagreements surface rather than being averaged away.
Update cadence
Countries re-ingest as their sources refresh. Each record carries its own vintage; the status page shows the newest vintage per country.
Attribution & upstream licences
Where a source carries a licence with attribution obligations, we state it here and preserve it per record, and licensed extracts carry it downstream:
- Nigeria Health Facility Registry (NHFR), Federal Ministry of Health: Nigeria's facility spine
- National master facility lists published by ministries of health across our coverage, including lists released on humanitarian data platforms under CC-BY and CC0 terms
- GRID3 facility datasets, CC-BY 4.0, used for archived cross-referencing and parts of coverage
- OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL: parts of North Africa coverage derive from OpenStreetMap and are © OpenStreetMap contributors
- Mauritius open government data, CC-BY 4.0
Field dictionary
The 38 attributes in the canonical schema, grouped:
| Group | Fields |
|---|---|
| Identity | Veligraph ID, name, source record ID |
| Place | country, region, district, ward, address, coordinates, geocoding confidence |
| Classification | facility type, care level, ownership, ownership subtype |
| Capacity | inpatient beds, inpatient and outpatient service, operating hours |
| Staffing | 13 cadres: doctors, nurses, midwives, pharmacists, lab scientists and technicians, dentists, CHOs, CHEWs, HIM officers, environmental health officers, attendants |
| Services | on-site laboratory, imaging, pharmacy, ambulance, mortuary |
| Regulatory | licence status, registration status, operational status |
| Provenance | source name, vintage, licence, verification flags |
FHIR mapping
The register maps onto HL7 FHIR R4: each facility is a Location with a managing Organization; on-site services map to HealthcareService resources. Veligraph IDs are carried as stable identifiers on all three, so FHIR consumers can join back to the portal and API. See the API docs.
Corrections
Run a facility and see an error? Email hello@veligraph.com with the facility's Veligraph ID (on every record page). Corrections that change a published figure are noted on the record.
Limitations
- Registers count what exists on paper; a listed facility is not a guarantee of functioning services.
- Vintages differ by country; some sources are several years old and are shown as such.
- Coordinates are geocoded for 67% of records; the rest are located to district level.