Project Details
Title:
GalamSick (Healthcare)
Details:
Illegal artisanal gold mining known as galamsey is contaminating rivers across Ghana's Western, Eastern, Central, and Oti regions with mercury, arsenic, cyanide, and cadmium. Millions of Ghanaians living near mining sites drink and bathe in these waterways daily, unaware the water is toxic.
The health consequences are severe and documented: chronic skin disease, respiratory illness, childhood malaria from mosquito breeding in mining pits, kidney and neurological damage, and birth defects in exposed children , a crisis flagged publicly by the Pediatric Society of Ghana.
Yet Ghana's health system responds entirely reactively. No system currently connects intensifying mining activity to clinical disease spikes. District health officers see patients after they are already sick, drugs are deployed after the damage is done, and the environmental cause goes unaddressed in any health planning.
This matters because affected communities are mostly rural populations with limited access to specialist care or clean water alternatives. The burden falls hardest on children and pregnant women. With galamsey expanding rather than contracting, the human health cost will continue to grow without a system capable of detecting its consequences early enough to act.
GalamSick is built entirely around Ghana's existing infrastructure. It uses DHIMS2 (Ghana Health Service's national health information system ) as its primary data source, requiring no new data collection. Satellite imagery is processed through Google Earth Engine, which CERSGIS and SERVIR West Africa already use to map galamsey sites in Ghana. The solution addresses Ghana's two core health system constraints: limited specialist capacity at district level, and reactive rather than predictive resource allocation. Risk scores are delivered via a web dashboard for district health officers and SMS alerts for community health workers , making it accessible on basic phones without internet, fitting Ghana's actual infrastructure. The problem is also uniquely Ghanaian. Galamsey is a Ghana-specific crisis, the affected communities are Ghana's most environmentally vulnerable, and every dataset powering the model is Ghanaian by origin.