Carrie Dolan

Half the world lacks access to essential health services, such as childhood immunizations or care during pregnancy, which means 100 million people are pushed into extreme poverty by health expenses. The challenge is to determine the most effective allocation of limited global health resources. There are not enough to go around, so policymakers must become selective about which patients receive care or which diseases get treated. I hope for the future that access to care in hard-to-reach areas is improved through more targeted resource allocation and that maps can be one part of that puzzle.

I made my first map while living in a poor Jamaican neighborhood, using a flashlight tightly gripped between my teeth, which provided just enough light to copy the waypoints from my field notes to my computer before the laptop battery died. A powerful tool, the map allowed me to communicate with the community, the health workers, and the minister of health in a way that made sense to everyone. From there, I set out to use maps to highlight gaps in public health resources in hard-to-reach areas—a skill I began developing more than two decades ago during my work with AmeriCorps and the Peace Corps, which was foundational.