Community Code Library for Subnational Tailoring of Malaria Interventions

English version

About

What is the SNT code library?

Subnational tailoring (SNT) is the tailoring of a country’s disease response subnationally to account for and appropriately address local heterogeneities in transmission, its determinants, and likely impact of various intervention strategies. Data, analysis, and modeling play an important role in certain steps of the SNT process to inform understanding of the epidemiological and intervention context and design of intervention strategies.

The steps in the SNT process are intended to align with and provide additional evidence during standard malaria planning and implementation processes. WHO has developed guidance for countries on the development of national malaria strategic plans (NMSPs) and related programme reviews, operational plans and costing that are to align with national health sector plans. SNT should be nested within these processes and timelines: it is not a separate process, as it is aimed at directly informing the programme reviews, NMSPs, resource mobilization, and implementation. A WHO-developed SNT manual is coming soon.

Many steps of SNT require analysis, such as descriptive analysis, statistical, geospatial, mathematical modeling, economic and financial, and more. While there is no standardized analysis for SNT, there are common steps done in nearly all countries that have undergone an SNT exercise. After doing SNT in >30 countries, analysts have come together to share experiences and code. The community-developed SNT code library is the result of this sharing.

The SNT code library provides quality-assured, explained code as a public reference resource to:

Help those who are starting SNT in a country to benefit from the experience of others in case they find it useful
Improve quality and reproducibility of SNT analysis by providing quality-tested code on the most commonly-used approaches and general advice on best coding and organizational practices
Promote accessibility of SNT analysis by providing organized and detailed resources and code that is easily digestible and adaptable

Users remain responsible for adapting the code in this library to the needs of the local SNT team and country realities.

What the SNT code library does not do:

The code library does not provide guidance for conducting SNT: please refer to WHO’s SNT Manual.
The code library also does not provide a step-by-step analysis plan, but rather it is a resource for quality-tested example code. For any particular country, some code will be relevant and some not. All will require adaptation.

While the SNT code library is built on experiences with SNT as applied to malaria, similar approaches could also be used for other diseases and adapted as needed.

Acknowledgements

Special thanks

We sincerely thank Dr. Abdul Mac Falama and Mr. Musa Sillah-Kanu from the Sierra Leone National Malaria Control Programme (SLNMCP) for permitting the use of Sierra Leone routine data as a teaching tool for this code library.

This code library would not be possible without contributions from many people in the SNT analysis community. We sincerely thank everyone who contributed code, developed pages, tested code, and reviewed content.

Project Leads

Name	Institution
Jaline Gerardin	AHADI
Mohamed Yusuf	AHADI

Developers

Name	Institution
Ousmane Diallo	Northwestern University
Bea Galatas	World Health Organization, Global Malaria Programme
Mohamed Kanu	Northwestern University
Samuel Oppong	Malaria Atlas Project, The Kids Research Institute Australia, and Ghana National Malaria Elimination Program
Safa Siddiqui	Northwestern University
Valérian Turbé	Clinton Health Access Initiative

Contributors

Name	Institution
Victor Alegana	World Health Organization African Region, Precision Public Health Metrics Unit
Celestin Danwang	World Health Organization African Region and Clinton Health Access Initiative
Anna Makido	Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Christina Matta	Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Tobias Holden	Northwestern University
Mujahid Nouredayem	World Health Organization, Global Malaria Programme

Reviewers

Name	Institution
Kate Battle	Institute for Disease Modeling
Justin Millar	PATH
Ricky Richter	AHADI
Sumaiyya Thawer	Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute
Hayley Thompson	PATH

Contact Us

We welcome your questions, feedback, and contributions. Here’s how to get in touch depending on your need:

Submit a question or comment

If you have a question about library content, a suggestion for the library, or have found an error in the library, please submit to the code library suggestion box by filling out this form.

Contributing to the library

If you would like to contribute, please contact info@appliedhealthanalytics.org with a request to be added as a contributor to the library’s GitHub repository and a brief description of what you would like to contribute.